Yesterday I took my 2 daughters ages 13 and 9 for their yearly pediatrician visit. I have been concerned about my daughter’s weight. Clara (13) has a shape just like me. She is very tall already 5’9” and is 207 pounds. The doctor had to have the talk with her about losing weight. She did a great job. She also had to speak to Elizabeth (9) that she does not want her to lose weight….she just does not want her to gain weight. Again I think the doctor handled it very well.
I was always overweight and I was put on a diet at age 5 and we NEVER had treats in the house. They were forbidden except for special occasions. So on special occasions all us kids would binge on the treats. I could eat an entire bag of chips, eat a half gallon of ice cream by myself in a day. This led me to eat like crazy when I was away from the house.
I did not want my daughters to have this negative relationship with food so I do have “forbidden” foods in my house. I always have told them that it is important to eat all food groups and be active. They have seen me lose 100 pounds and they see me making healthy choices and exercise. I have shared with them how I grew up and I did not want them to feel about food the way I did.
I can see that the girls don’t binge….I am happy about that. I wish they were not in the position to have to maintain or lose weight BUT I am very proud of them because they were very positive about the doctor visit.
Clara told me that she values my opinion and never feels that I nag her. It was kind of cool when the doctor was explaining what they should be doing they always said “my mom does that”
Clara should be about 185 pounds so she needs to lose about 27 pounds. I just told her that it would be much easier for her to lose the 27 pounds now than what I had to go through.
The difficult decision for me was do I want my daughter to have to weigh herself???? So I discussed it with her. I told her that it is important to weigh yourself on a regular basis so you always are aware of your body. We (really, Clara made the decision) to weigh herself once a week. She has already started to increase her activity level and said that she would start eating slower. She eats super fast. She will just weigh herself once a week and see if the scale SLOWLY moves down. If it does great, if not then we would take a closer look at her diet. She was smiling and very positive. I really hope I handled it well, I think so.
For Elizabeth, she loves carbs and she is active so I just discussed small food changes she could make. For both of them I discussed how they could make small changes during each meal and that is OK to have a treat and eat a hamburger once in a while. I said it again, that I did not want them feeling guilty eating a hamburger but they cannot do it every day.
For me…..had a great 4 mile run this morning, scale is steady at 217,green check yesterday and tomorrow I have 14 mile run #2.
Have a great weekend everyone!