46 chromosomes
Dad is the one with diabetes. He was diagnosed about 10 years ago, and has since been promoted from mild sensitizing drugs to multiple insulin shots daily. He’s maybe 30-40 pounds overweight on his worst days.
BUT.
In his natural environment, my Dad does okay with eating well. He really likes vegetables (!!!) and so generally he’ll steam up asparagus or broccoli even when my mom makes a pasta/meat/bread/sweets spread for dinner. But, in my family of 9, he was generally the only one who would eat them.
He has a natural hunger switch, eats less than the rest of us, and quits when he’s done.
Dad also doesn’t mind walking across campus to mail a letter, or go to a meeting, or whatever else, even though campus is nearly a mile long. For a while, actually, he was doing a lot of walking and lost some weight on accident. He looked and felt great. He used to play basketball and, for a while in my childhood, would play raquetball on Saturdays.
But, Dad loves my mom. He loves her so much that he enables her in her inactivity. They both work at the same university, but he has a parking sticker which allows him access to all of the roads and lots on campus. He routinely picks her up and offers her door-to-door services for her campus errands. He has crafted a life for her which is virtually without effort. She buys the groceries, but he hefts them out of the car and carts them up and down the stairs to put them away. He does the laundry, which involves another round of up-and-down-stairs runs. He even protects her from her greatest enemy: cooking.
Who can blame her? She hates cooking. After feeding 7 hungry babies, who wouldn’t? Apparently, she has always hated cooking, but now she especially hates the exertion of it — the standing and bending and lifting and chopping — so they routinely eat out. She doesn’t like exotic foods or anything with too much spice (and won’t even add salt to the foods she makes because “it tastes so strong”) so she’s stuck with places like Tony Roma’s, Outback, Applebee’s, and her favorite — Sizzler.
Believe me, she’s not eating from the salad bar at those places.
I was telling RecordStoreRomeo about it this weekend. I had made a delicious panini from scratch, using whole wheat artisan bread, fresh mozzarella, heirloom tomato slices, and pine nuts. I coupled it with a butter lettuce salad tossed with a homemade garlic/lemon dressing. It was superbly delicious, fresh, and whole. He asked, “Where did you learn to cook like this?”
Unfortunately, my answer was, “Mostly from cookbooks and tv shows.” My mother was a child of the 50’s, and her cooking reflects that. Her primary method of cooking involves various combinations of pre-packaged foods, relying heavily on Kraft products and other processed stuff. There’s nothing she loves more than a summer bar-b-que of chicken breasts, ribs, steak, and shrimp. She’ll fill up on those meats and not even leave room for mayo-drenched potato salad, let alone a leafy green. Costco provides a never-ending parade of frozen appetizers which were once fried — taquitos, chicken strips, egg rolls, and the like — on which she binges. And, she taught the rest of us well.
It’s going to be really interesting to see if she can survive Weight Watchers. I know it’s been hard for me.
May 23rd, 2007 at 5:54 pm
You can eat a lot of CRAP on Weight Watchers just like you can eat a lot of reasonable foods. We’ll see which route your mom takes! It could change her, or she could eat processed foods all day still.
May 24th, 2007 at 9:19 am
I was remarking to my mom and brother on Mother’s Day about how funny it is that I cook almost all my meals now becauseI used to complain about having to cook when we all lived together. They suddenly both groaned and rolled their eyes and were like, “Yeah, you were a total bitch about that.” I was rather surprised. I remembered disliking cooking, but evidently I really whined about it too.
Which is funny because I don’t mind cooking at all now. I find it strange when I occasionally get a comment on my blog about how I must be starving myself because I’ve never been more adventurous with food than I am now. I’m trying all new sorts of veggies and fruits. It helps a lot that I can now stand for long periods of time without my feet hurting. Back when I started I wanted to sit down after 5-10 minutes of chopping.
May 24th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
I tend to love cooking for myself, mosly because I am free to experiment when I’m on my own. My dad on the other hand, has very traditionally british views on what constitutes a meal. He also hates any new tastes, the only seasoning he uses is salt. Lots of salt. I find the endless ‘peel potatoes/cook meat/open tins of peas’ so boring that I start hating it.
May 25th, 2007 at 5:44 am
The one thing that’s good about your parents being on the diet together is that he will cook the foods and there will be less tempting foods in the house (I hope). Even Applebee’s has the WW dinner portion so she MIGHT give that a whirl.
I’m going to play with a DVD I bought called exercising for people who are in a chair. It might be something that your mom might try. (At PT, I saw a nifty thing that I might buy for my mom who has a really bad ankle/brace: it’s a bike pedal that sits on the floor and you watch TV and pedal away.)
I hope that they do well; I know it won’t be easy for them (or you by proxy having to hear about it).
May 25th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
I think it doesn’t really matter, like you said, what plan you choose, just as long as you pick a real one (and not the 100 bites diet) and stick to it. Even if you do eat nothing but crap on WW, if you’re staying within your points, it’s still less crap. So that’s a start. Maybe your dad will cook for your mom, who knows?
I find WW very tough sometimes and easier when I am in my routine and in control of my own food. It’s almost impossible if I go out to eat all the time, and completely impossible if I’m eating with my family and they’re cooking.