Part of what prompted this was I was going to cut back the other day and Shannon said I had better check with someone first so thanks to every for the advice. I am not at all offended and this is the type of info I was looking for specifically. So again thank you very much!
Maja.V I've listed out the where we fall to most of your suggestions before. The only reason I can do this quickly is that for each quarterly type 1 endo visit our son gets we also meet with a registered dietitian for 15-30 minutes. Looking over this below (very long sorry), do you see any snakes in the grass, or is it simply a matter of too much of anything is too much. Overall we are losing weight on this cleaned up diet, but just not fast enough. I was moving along great till I started the antidepressants (which I don't take for depression, but rather anxiety because they work great for that too), but after that I'm still managing to creep down. The problem is we don't want to creep down, but move along quickly (without doing a mega crash diet which just comes all back).
So far we have been very lucky with our children not picking up our habits. Our old son is pretty much 50th percentile for weight to height. But that is because we HAVE to monitor his diet because of we have to bolus enough insulin to match what he eats. Surprisingly our daughter is underweight for her size right now.
Here is a great piece of irony to add. Evidential my nose was broken when I was very young and no one ever bothered to tell me (just one of many mysteries including the disappearance of my medical records when I got back from college). I have at times had severe breathing problems and could not smell worth a hoot. Now that my nose is fixed EVERYTHING tastes SO much better because I can actually smell the ingredients.
We only do fast food when traveling. And we're trying to cut back on the sit down restaurants since with 4 it is anywhere from $35-$60+, and we're trying to build the emergency fund a little higher and of course I want to save for GCS now.
Shannon and I are already mostly water drinkers. Actually for 6 of the last 10 years we only drank water at all and juice/milk for the kids until our son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. So now we have water or diet cola. Personally I'm on a diet ginger ale kick, but I've always loved ginger. We have NO full sugar cola's in the house at all and any juices for the adults are in a mixed drink which is fairly rare for us.
We are starting to try and freeze things better. There are certain things we've always frozen like smoked pork butt. We'll usually vacuum seal into 1 lb bags around 4-5 pounds before we even start eating (fresh vacuum sealed boiled in a pot is 99% as good as fresh). We've also started splitting the soups and casseroles we like to make into two or three portions to freeze or give away. Both of our works got a lot busier this year (new way of doing TN teacher evals) so we've really appreciated the convenience. We also do leftover nights fairly frequently (often severed just a bit differently). When we smoke a brisket that is 3 or 4 dinners in one cook. If it doesn't get eaten, it doesn't get thrown away, but rather depending on what it is, it either gets fed to the dog, egg chickens in their coops, or the freerangers (geese/ducks/turkeys/meat chickens/peahen).
Meat wise no one in the family is a vegetarian. I've try to introduce them to tofu when I stir fry, but I'm still the only one that will eat it. We prefer our spaghetti without meat just some sort of bold marinara. Occasionally I do get to pull off a rice and black beans Mexican night. We try to have grilled salmon or some type of fish as a special treat 3-4 times a month, but it also depends on what we are working on that weekend. When it comes to beef a brisket is the only beef we use at all. For burgers we use ground turkey. We keep a chunk of slicing Black forest ham around for either omelets or pressed sandwich nights. 50%+ of our meat is from broiler chickens we raise and process (50 at a a time). We have plenty of fresh chicken and duck eggs. We used to do them organic, but we had to freight in the organic feed and it is simply too much money to keep doing it. [The globe icon on my profile points to our site at
www.dragonflydreamsfarm.com if anyone is interested in seeing a VERY small farm in action].
Junk food vs fruit is not really a problem for us because if we have junk food then our son wants it and they are always LOADED with carbs. We actually have a small orchard out back. We try to freeze the extra, but generally speaking the birds beat us to part of it. We also lost a freezer this year. We had a TON of black cherries, apples, and white peaches.
Starch-wise frys are a special treat. Most meals get rice (60%), but we also do baked and whipped potatoes (25%/15%). There are probably 2-3 days a week I have yogurt and don't get my oatmeal for breakfast because we've done a double batch of rice for the previous and next nights meal (it has a lower temp keep warm for 24 hours). Somewhere between 48 and 72 it gets an off smell we we toss it, but that rarely happens.
Veggies can be a problem for Shannon. I often post on our Facebook walls a picture of hers compared to mine just to show what a difference the color of the veggies make (and to try and get her friends to get to to try more veggies) [BTW Yes, dear I know you can read this too!
] Via stir fry I have gotten Shannon to start eating broccoli. The kids are with me and will eat almost any vegetable steamed. Our daughter could live on edamame.
Our current favorite chocolate is the Dark Lindt Chili. That touch of spice really makes it stand out. But lately we've not been on a chocolate kick.
