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Way back in May, JD was warning about the consequences of trying too much at once. In both of our cases, trying too much at once is equivalent to maintaining the calorie deficit that we need to drop 1 pound per week AND exercising enough to increase our PHYSICAL fitness levels to where we want them to be. During that post, he listed off some of the items he’d recently eaten—chocolate cake, snowballs, and red vines. He then went on to explain that it didn’t make sense for him to ask his wife (who doesn’t have a weight problem) to change her eating habits so that HE wouldn’t be tempted by unhealthy foods.
While I agree with JD completely, not everyone who read that day did. One of the comments really made me wonder how people without weight problems help support their loved ones with weight problems.
JD…You’ve committed to weight loss seriously enough to start a blog, and admitted that willpower is a big problem for you (just like it is for pretty much everyone). Yet you think it’s unreasonable for you to ask your wife not to fix chocolate cake? Weight loss is very hard…. I think it’s very reasonable (if not an absolute necessity) to ask the people in your family and the people you live with to commit to making your diet the best it can be. Otherwise, how do you expect to be successful? Of course you have to develop willpower, but how does every other person trying to break an addiction deal with it — firstly, limiting access to the temptation as much as possible. Alcoholics don’t hang out in bars, at least not when they are first becoming sober.
At my house it’s easy. I do 99% of the grocery shopping for the family. I don’t really buy too much junk food anymore because I know that I’ll eat most of it. I still buy “kid friendly” food that tests me (I sometimes fail). But for the most part, I feel like I’m pretty successful. My wife really gets the short end of the stick here. She loves a good glass of juice or a can of soda. And she’d probably sell me for a nice big bowl of ice cream. But I don’t buy it unless she writes it down on the list. I really appreciate the sacrifices that she makes for me.
As with all problems, there is a huge range of solutions. I’m sure some of you skinnies out there say, “Suck it up fatty! I’m eating ice cream.” And I bet some of you only cringe on the inside while asking, “Please pass the carrots sweetie.” But I’d really like to hear how you all manage this problem in your households. Should non-dieters compromise their lifestyle in order to support their overweight family members?
J.D.
25 responses so far ↓
1 MITBeta @ Don't Feed the Alligators // Jul 9, 2008 at 7:08 am
I can see it both ways. I lost 20 pounds while my wife was pregnant and eating everything in sight. It didn’t seem right for me to try to limit her options while she was “eating for two.”
On the other hand, I still “struggle” with my weight and have to watch what I eat very carefully. If I can’t control myself during the day and eat too much of whatever is available around the office, I have asked my wife not to get mad if I don’t eat whatever she has prepared for dinner. I do try to give her notice if I don’t think I’ll be eating, but that doesn’t always happen.
So when she does make dinner that I shouldn’t eat, I just throw it in a plastic container and take it for lunch the next day.
2 Amber // Jul 9, 2008 at 7:25 am
I think it’s really important for spouses to help each other with these kinds of things. My husband and I are both on a quest to be more healthy, but he can eat a lot more calories every day than I can to maintain his weight. That means that he can have cookies or chips or whatever more often than I can. If he knows that a treat is going to be something that is hard for me to resist, he’ll only eat that stuff when I’m not around. We’ve gotten really good at freezing stuff like homemade cookies and the like, which he’ll pull out when I’m not here. If he wants fast food, he’ll get it on a night when I’m at class or hanging out with my friends.
Although it is important for people to develop willpower, being constantly faced with a plate of cookies each time I go in the kitchen is asking too much right now.
It doesn’t seem fair for one spouse to continue doing something that he/she knows is derailing the other one’s attempts to get healthy, especially when it’s not necessary.
3 elisabeth // Jul 9, 2008 at 7:29 am
my husband doesn’ t have a problem with his diet; I do. But it’s not a case of his needing to support me by giving anything up; on the contrary, if I could learn to eat like he does, I wouldn’t have a weight/diet problem! The way he offers support is by not nagging at me; he doesn’t comment if I add icecream to the shopping cart, and he doesn’t sneer at my my cheez-it habit. And of course there’s his great model of limiting his servings, limiting his indulgences and so on.
Also, he makes me plate of fruit when he makes his own breakfast, to go with whatever I make half an hour later when I get up, and he makes sure we have a salad every night with whatever I cook for our dinner.
both of which are a great help.
4 robin // Jul 9, 2008 at 7:37 am
My husband works in construction. He is lifting things and climbing stairs and got knows what all out in the heat all day long, and his argument is, he needs extra calories. (Not to mention, his paycheck buys all the food.) He is a snacker by nature and feels he DESERVES that scoop of ice cream or slice of cake after dinner.
Also, I love to bake, and I love to see people enjoying my cooking. Most of our desserts are things I’ve made with whole wheat flour and reduced sugar, subbing applesauce for oil, etc, so even the sweets around here are somewhat healthy.
I get up right after dinner and do the dishes, water the garden, or take a shower while everybody else eats dessert, so I don’t have to see it.
I also brush my teeth IMMEDIATELY after every meal so I’m not tempted to snack; it’s too much trouble to go back and brush them again. (I imagine this also saves me money in dentist procedures in the long run!)
5 Eden // Jul 9, 2008 at 7:43 am
I can see both sides of the argument. The problem is, chocolate cake on its own doesn’t make you fat. Maybe my wife can eat one small piece and be satisfied, but maybe I lack willpower to eat one small piece and I eat 3 big pieces. Should my wife not enjoy chocolate cake because I lack self control?
6 macdaddy // Jul 9, 2008 at 7:53 am
7 J.D. // Jul 9, 2008 at 8:21 am
As you might expect, this is a question that comes up from time-to-time in our house. While I seem to have the exercise portion of my regimen down, the dietary aspect still isn’t where it needs to be. There’s no question I’ve made progress, but I’m still an emotional eater, and I still crave ice cream, Red Vines, and cake.
Kris bought ice cream for guests recently, for example. There were leftovers. Well, J.D. (in his infinite wisdom) allowed himself to have a bowl every day until it was gone. This frustrated Kris, and for good reason. She wants to be able to have ice cream in the house and know that I won’t eat it.
One solution we’ve found is for Kris to pick indulgences I don’t like. I hate the taste of coffee, for example. If Kris buys coffee-flavored ice cream, that stuff is safe.
Also, I continue to work on my self-control. Those Girl Scout cookies she’s had in the pantry for MONTHS? I haven’t touched them.
On the other hand, there are a couple of brownies left from last night’s dinner with one of her former students. It’s going to be all I can do to keep from eating those for breakfast…
8 Emily // Jul 9, 2008 at 8:41 am
This has made me think about my own diet excursion with my partner, who doesn’t need to lose a pound. I started my diet a couple of months ago and have lost 15 pounds so far (hooray!). She is incredibly encouraging, and we only eat what is on the diet. I sincerely hope that when she’s at work she has a cookie, some ice cream, something because I know she would feel bad eating that stuff at home in front of me. This post has made me realize what a great sacrifice she’s making for my healthy well-being.
Conversely I know that I wouldn’t be very pleasant to be around if at the end of the night she sat down with a big bowl of ice cream and I had my sugar free popsicle.
I agree with J.D., I haven’t had sugar in 2 months and I still crave it. I never realized how hard it was to get rid of those cravings, and I’m wondering if they ever go away..
9 Deb // Jul 9, 2008 at 8:46 am
I think I have a different take: chocolate cake is not a healthy food for anyone. Neither are cookies, or chips.
While I do not believe that means everyone you know should abstain from eating these foods, I do believe that all of these are foods that can acquired outside the home. When you go out to eat, the spouse can order a piece of cake. Or even purchase a single slice at the store. Chips and cookies, too, can be made, ordered, and eaten outside the home.
That way the family does not have to deny themselves any treats they may wish, but it inforces the idea (especially for kids) that these are not “every day” foods. They are occasional treats.
These can purchased/ordered either in my presence when I can choose to order some too or not to, or they can be ordered at a time when I am not around.
Consuming these foods does not mean that they need to be ever present in the home.
10 MITBeta @ Don't Feed the Alligators // Jul 9, 2008 at 9:07 am
@ J.D.:
Change the portion size. I find that I’m just as satisfied eating an espresso cup (think tiny) full of ice cream and enjoying every little bite as I am by a full bowl of ice cream. With a full bowl I take bigger bites and it’s gone just as fast… Savor it, make it last, enjoy it!
11 Kristin // Jul 9, 2008 at 11:29 am
In a word - yes. When you are talking about food that is brought into the home for consumption on a daily basis, I think it is absolutely important (almost said mandatory) for non-dieting adults not to sabotage the dieters by loading the house with trigger foods. First of all, eating healthy breakfasts and dinners does not hurt anyone. The non-dieter has plenty of opportunity to eat as much junk as they want at work or outside the house. It doesn’t need to be in the fridge or cupboard. (I think making a cake or cookies, except for special occasions, is almost intentional sabotage!) I take a slightly different opinion with restaurant meals - I wouldn’t expect anyone I was with to turn down the fish and chips just because I’m eating a grilled chicken salad. But I think it’s easier to practice moderation and self-control in a restaurant than at home in front of a half-gallon (or 3 quarts, as they apparently are now) carton of ice cream. With kids in the home, I know it’s a little different problem. Healthy eating is good for them, too, but I admit it may be harder to convince them that salmon, brown rice and salad beats chicken fingers!
12 JFBF // Jul 9, 2008 at 11:45 am
Oh, that is a tough one. I think my take on it is that I’ll do what my spouse asks, whatever he feels he needs in terms of support. If he asked me to not have sweets, etc. at home, I would try my best to support that - I mean, honestly, no one NEEDS those, and in the long run, I’d be happier if I never ate them, either. (And as other posters have mentioned, those can be acquired outside of the house, at work, at lunch, etc.) But if he said (and he sometimes does) “I’m on a diet, so I’m avoiding sweets, but don’t feel like you have to - I can handle you having dessert,” then I probably would have it. I guess it depends on the relationship, but I can’t imagine that there’s anything consumable that I couldn’t give up for him if it was important.
13 Andrew is getting fit // Jul 9, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Actually I think it does make sense that the whole family eats healthy so in my household everyone eats healthy. We don’t have junkfood in the house but we are free to eat it outside.
I’m fortunate in that my wife doesn’t have a sweet tooth at all so it hasn’t been a problem but I could see how it could be.
14 greenman2001 // Jul 9, 2008 at 12:31 pm
What is kid friendly food?
15 Sheamus // Jul 9, 2008 at 12:57 pm
Should non-dieters compromise their lifestyle in order to support their overweight family members?
No. It’s not only selfish, it’s a failing to take responsibility for your own actions.
There are two things to consider here. First, I think what’s missing is identifying *why* you need to eat this stuff simply because it’s there. If you don’t figure that out, you’ll never have a sustainable weight-loss plan, as you’ll always be presented with an opportunity to fail. For most people it’s usually boredom. For others, it can be something far deeper rooted that may need professional help.
You can’t expect your immediate family to suffer because you are. What if you go to a restaurant with friends - can nobody order dessert just because you can’t have it? That’s ridiculous, of course, but it’s not really much different to expecting your partner to live like a monk because you feel like you have to.
And there lies problem #2 - if your diet is that strict that you can’t ever have chocolate cake, it’s doomed to failure from day one. Life sucks without chocolate cake, and it sucks without beer, ice cream, pizza, cheeseburgers, brownies and cheesecake.
This is why a 6 days on/1 day off diet is the best solution for everybody. Eat clean for six days, and eat whatever you like on the seventh. And I mean whatever!
The best part of this regime is the ‘clean’ part can be any diet you like – Atkins, South Beach, high protein, vegetarian, whatever. I personally eat low-GI from Sunday to Friday, and my cheat day is (nearly) always a Saturday. On that day I regularly eat a fried breakfast (usually out), pizza, Chinese, muffins, chocolate, fries, etc. It’s all good.
Every 1-2 weeks I also have an ultra-clean, 500-calorie deficit day (against my normal clean days), too. What this all does is keep my metabolic rate guessing – my body is confused as to what’s coming up next and as a result it keeps busy, doesn’t slow my rate down due to boredom or, worse, start hording fat for winter.
Psychologically, it’s amazing, as I only have to wait six days each week before I can have a donut.
Moreover, if you know you’re going out for a meal with friends, you can plan your off day around that. This means you can actually, you know, enjoy yourself, instead of ordering a garden salad while they’re all eating pizza.
I call all this 80-20 nutrition, because 80 per cent of the time you’re eating clean, and 20 per cent you’re not (the regime assumes 35 meals per week, with a two-meal failure rate). 80 per cent is an amazing rate for healthy eating – if you can maintain that throughout your life, you’re on to a real winner.
If you have kids, it’s impossible to avoid having all ‘treat’ foods in your house. Each to their own, but while your kids should eat a balanced diet, preventing them from having any treats (like ice cream, say) always backfires on them (and you) in the long term.
Simply removing all foods so they can’t possibly be eaten isn’t the solution to your ‘problem’. You need to step up! Find some willpower. Don’t let food control you. I realise that’s easier said than done but anyone can manage it for six days a week.
And that’s why 80-20 nutrition is, IMO, the best way to manage those cravings.
16 macdaddy // Jul 9, 2008 at 1:44 pm
17 Joel // Jul 9, 2008 at 2:53 pm
When my wife is cutting out fatty things, I (a relatively skinny person) compensate by drinking more booze. I’m then able to cheerfully ask her to pass the carrots.
18 greenman2001 // Jul 9, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Just think of all the traffic I generate for you, Mac.
I was one of the people who told JD he should ask Kris to stop baking chocolate cakes and leaving them around the house. He told me he felt it was unfair to ask her to stop doing something she loved: baking. I think JD’s a sweet guy for protecting her interests like that. But if that’s the constraint you chose to operate under, then I think you should have a plan for confronting the slice of cake that greets you when you open the refrigerator door. Or the package of string cheese, in your case. Ultimately, these foods are just calories, and you ought to have a plan for adjusting your calorie intake around them in the likely event your willpower comes up short when you’re confronted with them. It’s helpful to have some tools besides willpower in your toolbox.
In JD’s case, the consumption of chocolate cake immersed in a glass of milk seems to take place when he’s under stress and pressed for time and voraciously hungry. If he’s still following the Fit for Life Plan, he’s likely to be famished after doing all that exercise first thing in the morning on an empty stomach, not having eaten since the night before. (I notice that chocolate cake and brownies seem to be morning food for him.) It seems unreasonable to blame the chocolate cake – or Kris — in that circumstance, doesn’t it? A plan might involve eating a full meal prior to opening the refrigerator door, so that he’s at least not starving when he’s confronted with the chocolate cake. Then, if he goes forward with the full disaster, he can at least face the fact that he’s not doing it because he’s hungry, but because of stress, or depression, or anxiety, or whatever, and he can confront those deeper issues if he chooses to.
In your case, you’ve mentioned both stress and boredom as being triggers. You know I think you should confront those issues and sort out what’s going on there. But, apart from that, as a practical matter, you’ve constructed a system for yourself in which the time elapsed between your impulse to eat and the consumption of food is about 15 seconds: feel bored, unwrap your kids’ string cheese, push it into your mouth, and you’re done. You’re a good problem solver! You have all kinds of systems like this that you’ve described in the blog. I suspect that exercise is another steam valve for you – it’s time that gets you away from the kids and your stay-at-home-Dad responsibilities for a period of time, and in that sense it’s a coping mechanism with a healthy outcome all around. You can probably see where I’m going with this: as long as your impulse to eat when stressed is there, why don’t you work to pack healthy, home-cooked food in the diaper bag instead of a sodium-delivery-vehicle like Goldfish? Pack an apple. Pack a yogurt.
I guess the problem I see with the question you’re asking is that it shifts the responsibility for creating a sustainably healthy lifestyle away from yourself. You imply here that you’re packing processed, high-calorie food in the diaper bag as a favor to your children, although in previous posts you’ve said that your kids are happy to eat healthy foods and exhibit a great deal more self-control when it comes to unhealthy food than you do. I guess I would ask you why, other than your own convenience, you’re tempting them with unhealthy food? Are they, or Pam, complaining about the food they’re not getting? And if the problem is your lack of willpower, it seems to me you want it both ways: you insist on relying solely on willpower to resist your impulses, then complain when your willpower comes up short and ask questions like, “is it fair to ask my wife to sacrifice her ice cream for me?” You recently posted here about a meal plan that would relieve you of the stress-filled, time-consuming task of cooking lunch and dinner every night for your family – your response was, I don’t think my family would like this. Are you being honest with yourself about where your impulses stop and theirs begin? What do they have to say about all this? When you ran the afore-mentioned meal plan past Pam, she didn’t say, “I’d hate this,” she said, “You’d hate this, Mac, because you hate eating leftovers.”
You and JD are both making great progress, but as you do you begin to confront much deeper issues, issues that are harder to blog about or tally like pushups. It would be one thing if JD’s one diet weakness was Kris’s chocolate cake. But the fact is, when he’s anxious, tired, stressed, or short of time, he’ll eat anything – Sno-balls, Red Vines, all kinds of things and too much of them. In that context, it seems besides the point to ask Kris to stop baking. And while Pam seems perfectly happy to give up ice cream for you, don’t you feel a little guilty shifting your attention to your kids’ treats and then framing that dilemma as a relationship question?
19 Nottheangel // Jul 9, 2008 at 5:09 pm
My husband has no problem with his diet. He eats things in small portions and stops when he’s hungry. I have asked him to buy cookies and things that he likes that I don’t as a favor to me, and he’s been pretty good about it. Fortunately, I can mentally trick myself that the food isn’t ‘mine’ if I don’t buy it, so as long as he has “his” treats, I’m less tempted to eat them. He’s also being very helpful about asking me if a purchase I’m about to make is an impulse buy because I’m stressed or if I really want a box of Nilla Wafers (for example).
and he loves my cooking, so eating healthy dinners isn’t hard as long as I’m willing to make them.
I’ve found that if I bake sweets, it gives me a lot of control over substituting things to make them healthier and control over portion size. I can make a cake, or I can make cupcakes (much less likely to overeat if it is in smaller portions).
20 J.D. // Jul 9, 2008 at 5:45 pm
Greenman2001 wrote: You and JD are both making great progress, but as you do you begin to confront much deeper issues, issues that are harder to blog about or tally like pushups.
I actually agree with this. I think Mac does, too. For me, the reason I don’t blog about them isn’t because I’m afraid to (goodness knows I’ve blogged about every detail of my life for seven years now), but because:
a) I don’t personally know all of the deeper reasons that make me eat.
b) Those posts take more emotional energy. I’m willing to put that sort of energy into a post, but mostly I’ve been saving them for GRS instead of GFS.
In many ways, I feel like GFS is capturing me earlier on the curve than GRS captured my financial life. With my finances, I had a LONG period where I had to ask myself what was important to me and experiment with different approaches to money. Now I have a “system”, but it wasn’t always like that. But when I started GRS, my system was already fairly coalesced. At GFS, I’m still very much on the learning side of things.
It would be one thing if JD’s one diet weakness was Kris’s chocolate cake. But the fact is, when he’s anxious, tired, stressed, or short of time, he’ll eat anything
Well, not anything. I have very particular foods I fall back on. They’re almost all fatty, sugary snacks: donuts, sugared cereal, packaged cookies and cakes, candy, etc. And I have a suspicion as to why this might be the case. When I was a boy, we didn’t get a lot of this food, and when we did it was because my parents were trying to somehow show affection or to comfort us.
But I won’t eat just anything.
21 Early Retirement Extreme // Jul 9, 2008 at 7:04 pm
What Sheamus said!
I would also that even though the same kind of foods are available to a family, it does not mean that they will be eaten in the same proportions. For instance, there is this problem of splitting treats evenly (probably acquired from childhood) even though one person can clearly handle a much larger caloric intake than the other e.g. person A eats one potato and one piece of cake, while B eats four potatos and one piece of cake. On the whole, B eats much healthier than A and A often doesn’t realize this since they are eaten “the same things”. The problem can even be more subtle than that. One person might be cutting off visible fat while the other is just shoveling it down. One might be adding nuts while the other is adding cheese.
This problem becomes highly exaggerated if one person is physically active (or worse quite muscular) while the other is sedentary. It is very hard to make a suitable diet for both persons using the same ingredients/kinds of foods.
For instance, a aerobically active person can down a lot of “sugary crap” while that would sit quite badly on a sedentary person and not help a anaerobically active person. Conversely, a more protein heavy diet won’t help a runner as much.
22 Dave // Jul 10, 2008 at 2:13 pm
On a similar note, I’ve found that the eating styles of myself and my wife differ when it comes to snacks. She’ll buy a bag of candy or something and then eat just one per day until the bag is empty, but she likes to have the stuff in the house. Me? If it’s in the house, I eat it, stopping only when I find the bottom of the bag. The difference is that I don’t have to buy the stuff. If it is here, I’ll eat it, but if it isn’t, I won’t buy it and won’t even think about it. Out of sight, out of mind I guess. I’ll agree that this is about my control, once the stuff gets inside the house, but she has no control when it comes to buying the stuff in the first place. I’m getting better with my control, and as someone else suggested, she tends to buy stuff that I won’t like as much.
23 Elaine // Jul 12, 2008 at 11:19 am
This actually reminds me of my various experiments with vegetarian/vegan/raw food lifestyles. It isn’t fair to expect your significant other to commit to a lifestyle change like that with you (though it’s very nice of them to at least try it). However, it’s rather rude of them to blatantly disrespect your choice or make it more difficult for you to try and achieve whatever goal you set for yourself.
When it comes to dieting, my significant other and I settled on something a lot like Amber did, above. Basically, it helps the dieter’s morale if your partner doesn’t indulge in your taboo foods while you’re around.
It also helps if the person who buys and eats the goodies manages to stash them somewhere the other person doesn’t usually look — like the bottom shelves of the pantry.
I like the frozen cookies idea, too. It’s harder to mindlessly eat something if you have to drag it out of the freezer and dethaw it first! You get extra points if you hide the cookies under a couple bags of frozen peas. 
24 MM // Jul 14, 2008 at 1:40 pm
I was formulating a response, then just read Deb’s. It’s perfect.
My husband had to come to terms with the fact that I had to take over the cooking. We both lost weight (him 20 lbs, me almost 60). He is perfectly okay, most of the time, with us not having snack food in the house.
It is all too easy to get it, why do we need it every day at home? Answer, we don’t. He can keep it at his office. He can hide some in the closet for after I go to bed.
If only I could get my mother to do the same. We live on opposite coasts, but when I visit she is constantly buying candy, baking cookies, etc. Cookies, cakes, candies…these should be a once-a-week kind of thing (and were when I was growing up in the 70’s). They shouldn’t be an everyday kind of thing.
25 Sally Parrott Ashbrook // Jul 15, 2008 at 9:36 am
My personal take on this is . . .
Is the dieter dieting in the typical American sense? As in, lots of processed low-cal foods like Diet Coke and fat-free cheese?
If so, no, I don’t know that it’s fair or healthy to involve the whole family.
But if the dieter is eating healthier portions of healthier whole foods as a method of losing weight, then I say get everyone on board. I’m sure we’ve all seen that just because you are relatively thin doesn’t necessarily mean you are healthy, and if one person is overweight on a family’s diet, then I see that as a bit of a canary-in-the-mine kind of situation where the whole family’s diet can probably use a makeover for avoidance of future diet-related diseases and future obesity issues.
Last, when I was an overweight kid, I wish my parents had changed the diet of the whole family to a healthier one instead of singling me out (especially since both my parents were, at that time, overweight themselves!).
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