Dieting with a Family

September 17, 2015 10:01 AM

I recently started a weight loss research study that will last three months. In addition to regular exercise, it involves eating only pre-packaged meals supplemented with fruits and vegetables. I'm really excited about this opportunity to lose weight and learn healthy habits, but I'm worried my family is going to make it difficult for me. How can I stick to this diet without drastically interrupting my families eating habits and my social life?

Weeknights are my biggest concern. My husband works until 7-8 pm at least 3 nights a week, but my two-year-old son eats dinner around 6pm. Up until I started, I would cook dinner most nights to share with my son, and we'd save the leftovers for when my husband came home. We've never made special meals for my son before, he always just eats what we're having.

The weekends will be challenging, too. We have a lot of family members in the area and regularly eat with them (both home-cooked meals and at restaurants). I can't even drink alcohol, which will make the upcoming holidays and weddings much less fun.

I'm only three days into the diet portion and it's a lot more difficult than I thought. I hate making food for my son that I can't eat. Even TV dinners are tempting me. I assumed I could leave shopping and meal planning to my husband for the nights he is home early, but he hasn't been able to come up with anything more complicated than grilled cheese. And now, we've been invited out to eat with my in-laws tonight.

I guess I didn't really plan for this very well and don't know how to handle it. Right now, I'm thinking about making some crockpot meals on the weekend and freezing them so I know there is something healthy available for my husband and son. Or maybe just giving my husband the recipes and hoping he will take the lead. I don't really want to go to a restaurant, but I don't want to completely avoid all social obligations.

If I don't strictly follow the plan, I can get kicked out of the study. Once this three-month phase is over, I can go back to eating healthy foods with my family. There is a year long weight maintenance phase afterwards that I'm most looking forward to.

I know lots of people deal with diet restrictions all the time, so I'd really appreciate any practical tips or suggestions to help us get through the next three months.

posted by galvanized unicorn to Food & Drink (14 answers total)

Best answer: How on-board with this is your husband? Have you explicitly told him what kind of help you need and what you are having trouble with? If not, you need to do so. It is going to be very hard to do this without a significant amount of support from your partner. They are also going to have to be ready to run interference for you with family, particularly his family. People can get really weird and mean when someone goes on a strict diet, and he needs to back you up when you have to bow out of social events or refuse Aunt Edna's meatloaf.

I would suggest the following workflow:
1. You make 1-2 crockpot meals on the weekend that can be split into 4 kid portions and 2 Dad portions and frozen for the week ahead.
2. When your husband gets home early, he makes dinner for himself and the kiddo.
3. When your husband gets home late, kiddo gets a frozen meal and husband makes something for himself or a frozen meal if extremely pressed for time.
4. Budget for the occasional take-out meal that your husband can pick up on his way home.
5. You should plan to cut back severely on the number of food-based social events you go to. You and your husband should ask family to plan more non-food-based events (hikes, museum visits, sporting events, concerts, etc) and you should plan to host some yourself.
6. When you do go out to eat, feel free to bring your pre-packaged meal and order a side of steamed veggies or whatever, if possible. Restaurants are generally very accommodating to special diets, as long as you tip based on what the bill would have been if you had ordered a full meal.

If your husband and extended family are not supportive, I don't know what to tell you.
posted by Rock Steady at 10:21 AM on September 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

Seconding that you need to get your husband on board with this.

For the cooking, have you looked at weekly meal preps? For example, Kitchen Karate offers a program, but you can also plan it out yourself. This way you can do a whole week's cooking in one afternoon. Your husband can heat up his own food when he needs to eat.

Also, seconding cutting out food-based social events. Does the program allow any "cheat" meals? Most programs allow one meal or one day a week. (Of course, it's good to not go overboard.) I would be flexible about which day that is, and spend that meal on socializing. If you do go to a restaurant with your own meal, tip well.

Is this a research for a specific product? If so, you need to reflect this difficulty to them. 3 months is actually quite a long time to change something as drastic as food habits. They will kick you out if you don't follow the program, because it wouldn't show the results they want. But in reality, the product is difficult to use, because of all these strict restrictions.
posted by ethidda at 10:27 AM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think it might be good to show your husband the Emotional Labor Thread. The labor of planning your family's meals and making sure your kid gets fed have been falling on you (and I realize some of this is practical due to timing). Make it clear to him that this is something where he needs to step it up by at least taking on his share of the planning processes for his and your kid's meals, because, honestly, a grown man should be able to think up more meal ideas than grilled cheese.
posted by damayanti at 10:46 AM on September 17, 2015 [8 favorites]

If your husband has never been the one cooking for your family/kid, it's actually a pretty big leap for him to suddenly know how to meal plan and cook. I'd sit him down with some basic recipes and hold his hand a little, at first.

Also, I would check in with whoever is your contact at the study about the difficulties you've having - perhaps they can help you figure out strategies?
posted by rainbowbrite at 11:12 AM on September 17, 2015

We have a lot of family members in the area and regularly eat with them ... And now, we've been invited out to eat with my in-laws tonight.

It's absolutely okay to decline the invitation to eat with your in-laws tonight. I'm not saying that you should become a hermit for three months, just that you don't have to figure this all out today. Once you have coping strategies in place, you can go back to your regular social schedule.
posted by purpleclover at 11:28 AM on September 17, 2015 [3 favorites]

I've said this before on AskMe, and I'll say it again.

When I was around 10 (with three siblings ages 8, 6, and 3), my father went on an extreme diet and lost over 100 lbs. Which he kept off. This was accomplished by drastically changing our family's eating habits on a permanent basis.

It was unilateral. My parents bought food. We were told that we would be eating the food that they bought. End of story.

They were somewhat more flexible than other parents on things like cleaning your plate. We were allowed, for example, to just have plain noodles with butter rather than the full on dish that was being cooked. We were allowed to make a sandwich instead of eating what was on offer. My parents didn't put up much of a fuss about typical junk-food adjacent childhood rites of passage like birthday cake, Halloween candy, and special treats like McDonald's or ice cream.

But the groceries that came into the house, and the meals planned by the adults who were in charge of the house, were things that were compatible with my father's new way of eating. And by and large, not only was it a success for my father, it also taught us kids baseline good attitudes toward food.

Also, two things about your outlook on this diet, in general. Firstly, you need to develop a plan for holidays and special treats and things that are going to save your sanity (like a drink here and there). Otherwise it's just not going to be sustainable. Any diet that requires nonstop self-denial, on a permanent basis, no "treat days" allowed is just not going to work. Secondly, your husband has to be on board with this.
posted by Sara C. at 12:21 PM on September 17, 2015 [9 favorites]

Best answer: If you want to have a meal with your son, most 2-year-olds would be happy and nourished eating the same fruits and veggies that you're supplementing with, plus some small lump of protein (cheese and crackers, a couple of chicken nuggets, etc).

In fact, that mindset could even be useful when you go eat with friends: many parents bring a tupperware of kid food for the toddler, and this is like that, but you will have your tupperware of mom food, and that's okay.
posted by aimedwander at 12:57 PM on September 17, 2015 [6 favorites]

Just for a point of reference, I was travelling with co-workers last year and my coworker Laura was on a strict diet for health reasons. Since we were all travelling, we went out to eat for most meals. Laura brought her meal to each restaurant and asked the waiter/waitress if they could heat up her meal (chicken and veggies with no oil/butter). Each was more than happy to accommodate.

You may want to call ahead to see if that's an option for restaurants so you can still socialize with friends/family while being out and about.

As for our other question, I agree that your husband needs to learn how to fend for himself for meals to help you be successful. If your success is not important to him, that's another question.
posted by Twicketface at 1:59 PM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: First of all, do your husband and child object to eating grilled cheese sandwiches three nights a week? From a nutritional perspective, it's perfectly safe to do that indefinitely, much less for three months. If they're not unhappy about it, I don't see why you should be.

It sounds like your problem with preparing separate meals for your family is not the labor but the temptation of handling tastier food you're not allowed to eat.

Your idea of batch-cooking some crockpot meals on the weekends is good.

If it's mostly seeing and handling the final product that you find tempting, another low-effort, high-reward strategy is for you to plan the meals and prep the ingredients but leave the final heating and plating to your husband. If he can grill a cheese sandwich, it's not that much harder to stir-fry some pre-washed, pre-cut vegetables with pre-cut, pre-marinated meat, prepared sauce, and pre-cooked, microwaved rice.

I suspect handing your husband some recipes is not going to work, because cooking for a family is a nontrivial skill that you've probably put significant time and effort into developing. Witness all the college kids posting here who literally can't even fry an egg. Not to say that you can't eventually shift the majority of the food prep in your household to your husband, just that a realistic time scale for accomplishing that is more like months than weeks. Longer if working until seven or eight p.m. means he works a lot overall, not just that he's scheduled late.

Can't say anything helpful about the social aspect, sorry.
posted by d. z. wang at 3:13 PM on September 17, 2015

Can you find out what restaurant you're going to tonight, and call and see if they can accomodate heating your meal? If they can't, don't go, but I think it would be worth the effort if you can make it work. It's not always fun to go to a restaurant and not eat, but it's a thing people do. I personally would choose to do this than miss all the socialising.

You kid and hubby can survive on grilled cheese for awhile.
posted by kjs4 at 4:11 PM on September 17, 2015

Would it work to get into a routine of eating your pre-packaged plan together with your son at 6 pm, then cooking something like what you would have typically made for the family in the past in the interval between when you have dinner with your son and when your husband gets home? Finally, save the leftovers from your husband's dinner for your son the next day. My thinking here is that you may be less tempted by the off-limits meal items if you make them right after you've eaten your plan meal.

I get that emotional and physical labor for things like meal planning is often unfairly divided between husbands and wives. But if your doing all the meal prep and shopping has been the division of labor you've agreed on, it's going to be a hard sell to push all that off on your husband because of your decision to participate in this rigid dietary requiring a radical change in your way of eating. In the long run, your husband's support is going to be an important part of your success. and I think you're right to be concerned about figuring out how to follow through with your commitment while minimizing disruption to his schedule/way of eating. Not that spouses aren't supposed to make sacrifices to support one another in achieving their goals, but I think shifting most of the meal prep/shopping onto his shoulders "and it can't just be grilled cheese" is not the way secure his cheerful support for your undertaking.
posted by drlith at 5:56 PM on September 17, 2015

First off, following a very strict diet for 3 months is hard, and something that most of us will never even attempt, let alone accomplish. Add to that being around people eating "normal" food AND having to prepare / worry about food that other people are eating? REALLY hard. Not to discourage you, just to give you permission to make it as easy for yourself as possible. Your family is unlikely to become malnourished or develop poor eating habits in 3 months. If Husband wants to make grilled cheese or get takeout, let him. Veggies and yogurt with berries for kiddo? Great! Be honest with your family about the kind of support you need, and be honest with yourself about what you can handle. If you're not up for making even crockpot meals, or attending events with lots of food or alcohol, then you're not. Take care of yourself, make your health a priority, and your family will benefit in the long run.
posted by storminator7 at 10:53 PM on September 17, 2015 [1 favorite]

Just a note that I have seen the phrase "Medically Supervised Diet" (which it sounds like this is) be very useful in the restaurant *and* family issues situations. Restaurants are generally a lot more understanding with that phrase rather than "I'm on a diet, so can you reheat this food for me?". People dining with you are often more understanding as well.
posted by freezer cake at 11:47 AM on September 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks so much guys. I talked it over with my husband and stressed how much I need his support and he really got it together. No, he's not making home-cooked meals every night, but he loaded up the fridge with pre-cut veggies, pasta salad, lunch meat, and all kinds of goodies that make it so much easier to prepare dinner for my son when he's not home.

I am still too hesitant to try bringing my meal to a restaurant, but I didn't even know that was an option. I managed to get by with picking at plain salads. Just a few days later, I'm so used to the diet that the thought of eating more really turns my stomach.

The next challenge is getting through a boozy bridal shower this weekend, but I'm feeling much better about it.
posted by galvanized unicorn at 9:38 AM on September 23, 2015 [1 favorite]