Tweak: Eat Dinner at the Table
This Tweak is going to be a little bit painful to write because I am going to bare my soul and talk to you about some of the times that cause me the greatest regret as a mother. And as parents know, our shortcomings as moms and dads are the shortcomings that are the hardest to accept. But we learn and we do better.
Nowadays my family eats breakfast and dinner together at the table almost every day. I think this gives us the chance to touch base as a family, creating a stable routine as our day ramps up and winds down. We have a lot of fun, laughs and sometimes some serious conversations. But this wasn’t always the case. Read more
Did Fat Acceptance Help Me Lose Weight?
In 1998 I became aware of the idea of “fat acceptance” and it may have changed my life. I say may have, because it was not until a couple of years later that I started making even the tiniest positive life changes that eventually led me to where I am today, over 100 pounds lighter than I was at my heaviest weight and finally living in a clutter-free, functional and peaceful home.
Have you heard of the fat acceptance movement? It is a loose affiliation of individuals and organizations uniting around the idea that fat people are unfairly targeted for discrimination and hatred in our society. Of course, any of us who are or who have been fat know the truth of this like we know our own names. The revolutionary idea, to me at the time at least, is that this is not okay. Being reviled, discriminated against and treated poorly simply because we are fat is not okay. And, conversely, it’s okay to be fat. Read more
Tweak: Eat Consciously
For years, more often than not I have combined eating with another activity: eating and reading, eating and watching TV, eating and surfing the Internet, eating and working. Growing up, when my mom and I shared a meal we’d frequently both have our heads buried in books.
Last year, I read some of Geneen Roth’s excellent books about emotional eating and I realized that multitasking while eating made it just too easy to overeat. Frequently I would finish what I was eating and then discover that I hadn’t even paid attention enough to enjoy the food. Read more
Dealing with Clothing Clutter
A couple of days ago I mentioned my own personal Mount Washmore* from back in my days of extreme household clutter. Mount Washmore was an 18-inch to two-foot deep pile of dirty laundry that covered our laundry room floor and spilled into our bedroom and the hall.
It’s not that I hadn’t been doing laundry, mind you. A couple of times a week I would wash three or four loads in a panicked laundry marathon. (Sunday nights were popular because it would dawn on me, “What the heck are we all going to wear tomorrow??!”) But since I was doing laundry under pressure, I would go through the huge heap trying to piece together enough outfits to get us all through a couple of days. I couldn’t just wash everything because there was so much dirty laundry. Read more
Tweak: Daily Fruits and Vegetables
Tonight at the dinner table over a plate of pasta, my teenaged daughters told me an astounding story. A year or two ago they went to a friend’s birthday BBQ. What was on the menu? Spaghetti with ketchup and barbecued hotdogs. I’m here to tell you that no matter what the USDA may say, ketchup is not a vegetable 
Research shows that eating at least 5 to 9 daily servings of nutritious fruits and vegetables can slow down your aging process and significantly reduce your risk of cancer, stroke, heart disease and more. But if you are in a rut, depressed about the state of the house and/or your struggles with weight and eating, eating habits can really suffer. Read more
Tweak: Declutter Daily
I can still remember the moment clearly when I decided to tackle the clutter once and for all. I was sitting at the computer desk in our bedroom.
The desk was piled high with mountains of paper, empty coffee cups, CDs, assorted junk and garbage and who knows what else. The bedroom in which the desk stood was crowded with cardboard boxes of clothes, plastic totes full of clothes and heaps of clothes. There were shopping bags full of papers. There were narrow paths to get around the room. Of course, the bed was unmade. Read more
Tweak: Sugarless Beverages
Giving up sugared drinks was one of the first positive changes I made back in 2001 when I was at my heaviest. I was stuck in a rut that may be familiar to you: virtually every day included a McDonalds run for a supersized Big Mac meal. (The reason for this routine may be familiar to you too — my kitchen was so hopelessly cluttered with junk and garbage and dirty dishes that it was often impossible to cook — but that is another story.)
With the meal comes a soda, of course. Back then, the supersized soda was 42 ounces — more than 400 calories.
I felt so much despair about my size and my out of control life that it seemed laughable to order a diet cola. “I’m as big as a whale,” I thought, “so who would I be kidding?” Read more