My Husband and the Diet, Part 2

My husband's not doing very well on this diet. He tells me he's doing it for me, because if he's on a diet, it will make it easier for me. I told him, I've been on diets plenty of times without him, and it doesn't really matter, but THIS time, he needs to watch what he eats just as much as I do. Still, I don't think he gets it.

My husband's not fat. At 6 feet 2 inches tall, he can carry a fair amount of weight. But he could stand to lose about 20 pounds, and he'd feel much better. Then there's the health issue part. His doctor told him to cut down on fats but increase his good cholesterol. That worried him quite a bit at the time, but it seems that now he's put that worry out of his mind and is simply dieting for my benefit. Men!

Every night after dinner, just as he's swallowing the last bite, my husband turns to me and says, "I'm still hungry." This is a man who could finish everything piled high on a plate and still go back for seconds, but he doesn't "get" the fact that as he's finishing the last bite, the food still hasn't hit his stomach. He's not supposed to be full yet--give it a few minutes for goodness sake! I, of course, usually look at him and roll my eyes. Hopeless. You'd think I'm starving the guy!

So last night, after the customary eye rolling, I headed back into the Sweat Shop for some quality quilty time. A half hour in, I started smelling something funny, so I came out to see what was going on. There was my husband, in the smoky kitchen with the window open and the exhaust fan going. Apparently he had gone rummaging for food and decided to try a 100-calorie snack bag of microwave popcorn.

According to him, he read the directions which said to microwave the popcorn on high for 1-1/2 minutes and stand by to stop it if it should finish popping early. He told me that at 30 seconds into it, the bag started smoking and burst into flames.

So, he tried it again. Goofy man that he is, this time he set the microwave for 30 seconds. Then 10 more seconds. Then 10 more seconds. Then 10 more seconds. I think we probably all know microwaves and popcorn don't really do very well with the start-stop-start-stop method of cooking, right? Sure enough, this time he had a bag of half-cooked, half burned popcorn.

I finally took pity on him and popped him up a bag. As expected, the popcorn finished cooking just as the timer hit 1-1/2 minutes. A couple over-done kernals, because I don't think you can avoid that with the kettle corn, but pretty much a nicely popped bag.

Good thing he isn't really starving, because with these cooking skills of his, he'd never live! Good thing too that I had the foresight to buy the 10-bag package of microwave popcorn--I think we might need it.

My Husband and the Diet

For several reason, it's been decided around here that my husband and I should both start eating healthier and lose some weight. For me, I've always been overweight. I've been on diets, lost weight, and eventually it creeps back on. Part of it, I know, is that I'm not physically active enough. I don't much like to sweat, for one thing. For another, I'd rather sit in front of my sewing machine and quilt. For a third, I get paid pretty good money to sit in front of a computer all day. As I get older, though, I realize that eating healthier and taking off some of the weight will make me feel a lot better--body parts just don't seem to work like they used to, and I seem to be developing aches and pains in places I never even thought twice about before.

What really pushed me into a diet, though, is that in doing a little basic medical research in connection with a lawsuit I've been working on, I came across some information that in the last few years, they've found that a fair percentage of women with the same hormonal-based "syndrome" I have become insulin resistant, and that leads to Type 2 diabetes. So, yeah, I don't really want that to happen to me.

For my husband, he has his own health issues that would be greatly improved if he lost some weight. More recently, though, he had a blood test that showed he was a bit low on his "good" cholesterol levels and, although his overall cholesterol levels are okay, some other test results led his doctor to recommend he cut back on fat.

So, with both of us looking at some good reasons to take off the pounds, on Monday night I went through some of my diet cookbooks and came up with some recipes for the next week or two. I made up a grocery list. Tuesday night I hit the grocery stores (Trader Joe's AND Safeway) and cleaned out some of the less healthy things around the house. We would start actually DIETING on Wednesday!

So Wednesday came, and I had a quilt club meeting after work and my husband had an appointment for a mechanic friend of ours to do some work on his van. As I left for work that morning, I told my husband he was on his own for dinner and would need to find some reasonably healthy food around the house or get something while he was out but nothing like a burger or other high fat foods. Fine. We were all set.

On my way to my quilt club meeting, I stopped at McDonalds--the only convenient stop between work and the quilt shop--for a grilled chicken sandwich, hold the mayo please! (Do you know they're now using honey wheat rolls for those? All the better!) Oh, yeah, and a plain iced tea. So, for 360 calories and 4.5 grams of fat, I was reasonably happy.

Later that night, my husband got home about 20 minutes after I did, carrying with him the "diet" food he had picked up on the way home. What do you suppose he chose? I looked in the bag, and lo and behold, there was a large paper tray filled to the top with French fries. On top of that were three fairly large breaded and fried fish filets. His justification? Well, isn't fish HEALTHY? And, of course, he was quick to tell me the restaurant uses unsaturated fat to fry the fish in!

This morning, I was up early, packing my husband's breakfast and lunch, something I NEVER, EVER do. I'm not a morning person. In fact, I can't even remember what I packed for him, but I do know it was a lot better than anything he would have packed for himself. I think this diet thing is going to be harder than I thought! Either that, or I'm going to have to find myself a good life insurance agent and take out a LARGE policy on my husband. OMG, the man is obviously diet challenged!

Well, now I'm off to pack his breakfast and lunch for tomorrow. I'm hoping after a few weeks of seeing the kinds of things that make up a good breakfast and lunch, he'll get the hang of it.

Author's Note: No, that's not him up there in the photo at the top. I just didn't really want to post a photo of a half naked fat woman, which seemed the most popular image search result!