Hi all, so I have some practical questions and also some general flailing.
I really want to get back to counting calories and shed the weight I've gained this past year/over the past 15 years, but I guess where I'm struggling is with how meals currently work for my family. I've got two school age kids and a spouse. One of my kids is a normal weight (and has this amazing ability to just know when she's full, and stop eating, even if she likes the food... no idea where that gene came from), one of my kids is borderline overweight (was fine before lockdown because he used to have a ton of activities, which of course all stopped - I'm not worried about him yet because I think once things open back up here and he goes back to tumbling, football, cricket etc he'll be fine), and I and my spouse are both obese. My spouse and my healthy weight child are vegetarian, I and my other child are not, but we eat vegetarian 75% of the time because I have never been bothered enough about it to cook separate meals with few exceptions (I will die for a good French beef stew in the winter).
One of the things I find frustrating about cooking for vegetarian kids is the reliance on pasta. It's not that I don't like pasta - it's that I love pasta. I could eat pasta forever.
I fucking hate trying to figure out how to weigh portions of pasta per person. I can weigh it dry, obviously, but then it cooks, and I add sauce and I just have no idea how to divide it evenly. Especially if, as sometimes happens, my spouse is less bothered about losing weight and I decide to try to give myself a smaller than regular portion. Same for rice - I have no idea how to weigh it when I'm actually dishing it up to make sure I'm not overeating while also making sure my kids are getting the right amounts for what they need (growth spurts vs the times when they seem to get all their needs met by breathing air and going in the sun).
The usual advice is to cook meals for the week on Sunday and just warm up as you go along, but then that means I'm eating differently to my family and that feels weird and uncomfortable. I don't want to draw attention to it, and I do worry about my daughter getting difficult messages about food and calories and weight when she honestly doesn't need it. I don't want her to watch me do things differently to everyone else and think that she also needs to count calories and restrict.
TL;DR:
- Question 1: How do you weigh out portions of pasta and rice when cooking for more than just yourself to make sure you're eating the right amount?
- Question 2: How do other people with families manage the different needs everyone has when trying to lose weight when not everyone in the house needs to or wants to, but not everyone is at a healthy weight either?
I really do want to lose weight, but I feel really overwhelmed thinking about how to manage it all, especially when I add in working (and working late twice a week) and doing my masters, and I feel like all the advice I see is assuming I live on my own and cook only for myself, when that's not my circumstances. And I guess I'm just feeling really tired already because I know that there are two nights a week when I'm exhausted and I just want to throw in frozen pizzas and forget about it. I feel like I have a lot stacked against me and I'm struggling to find the motivation to fight through it. It doesn't help that I'm a mum and I feel like most mums I know or know of are either pretty fat OR super-healthy types that just don't find it hard to stop eating. I don't want to be a fat mum anymore, but I can't imagine being able to just go out, eat without a care in the world, and know when to stop without even thinking about it.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/mqmgnp/counting_calories_weighing_food_but_im_not_just/
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