Smugly overweight??

I make bread every single week, cook all of my own meals (I'm a good cook), and I've managed to lose more weight than I ever thought I would.

Think portion control. To lose weight you don't have to give up cooking or the foods you love, you just have to have healthy boundaries around food and food scale nearby. Oh, and don't forget to log too. :bigsmile:

<<<<<<<<< got fat eating mom's homemade cooking. Overweight is overweight IMO. I just knew I had to change.

I think I'm missing something here. I'm not sure what you're husband is saying you're crazy about. I think a few people touched on this above, if you're a great cook, you probably have a natural gift towards how to prepare things, how things are going to taste. Someone with your ability should be able to put that talent towards making healthy foods. Healthy can be just as tasty as foods that aren't so healthy. There's always cookbooks that are put aside from others that are healthy. Even look at vegetarian cookbooks. They have some great healthy recipes and you don't have to be vegetarian to like them. Just give it a go and try. You have nothing to lose and much to gain.

I'm a bit of a wine connoisseur, myself. It's been over a decade since I've tasted from a bottle less than $15.

Sure, I get drunk and beat my wife and kids, fight cops when I drink, and have a slew of DWIs - - but the important thing is that because I drink better booze, I'm not as bad as those other drunks.


This comparison brought to you by the letter J and the number 3.

:laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh: :laugh:

I LOVE to cook. And I have been told that I am fantastic at it......

And I still cook and my husband still loves it and doesn't even realize it's "diet food"

But you can maybe rationalize it anyway you want but the end game is still the same...

I agree with lambchristie

I think if you go and add your recipes to the recipe maker you won't have to spend hours a nite entering everything.

I am with others ... you have got to want to lose the weight in order lose the weight.

You are a stay at home mom...I like the suggestion of going to the library and get some healthy cooking books and see how you can change up your recipes for everyone's benefit.

You can do this...your mindset needs adjusting before it will work.

Best of luck!!!!

I also am a SAHM that love to cook and make great food...
then my husband got diabetes... *sigh* what a game changer
We took a class in how to feed him and I learned how to make great healthy food. BTW I'm totally ok with you adding a smidgen of butter to make the sauce shiny. :-) But I helped him (and myself) by freezing the uneaten muffins, cakes, and well I stopped making bread because he can't resist it. I also got rid of the microwave so if i want to eat a frozen muffin It has to thaw naturally, and by that time I just hand it to one of the kids because the craving has usually passed.

My hubby went vegan, then raw, then my child had to be GF and Dairy free, I learned how to make gourmet food in each stage. I saw it as a challenge.. how can I make healthy food taste so good no one realizes it's healthy?

I helped myself by taking the time to add in the recipes here in MFP and now its so easy to track my homemade foods. I did take some weeks where I just repeated 4-5 meals so I only had to add in the 2 new recipes etc... on lazy days for example, I just type in homemade guacamole.... and go with what sounds the most like what I made. a guesstimate is better than no tracking at all :-)

Overweight is overweight, no matter why the extra pounds are there. There is not one excuse for over-eating that is better than any other excuse.

Ok - I'm looking for some "no, you're not crazy" here. And I totally don't mean to offend anyone. But I had this conversation with my husband the other day and he said I was crazy. I'm about 30 lbs. overweight, but outside of the concept of portion control, it's because I'm an awesome cook. I make great bread, baked goods, amazing sauces, roasts, etc. and I make almost all of it from scratch. We go through tons of butter, eggs, flour, potatoes, sugar, etc. I love to cook, I love making big meals for my little family of 4, and it's even more exciting when I can show it off. I'm a stay-at-home mom, I feel like you should get a 5-star meal if you come over for dinner. and that's not to say we don't eat out some times, and I don't stock some junk food, but mostly, if I eat it, I made it.

I think tons of butter, eggs, flour, potatoes, and sugar could make just about anyone a stellar cook (at least in terms of taste!)... but I agree with the others who have posted: find a way to be a stellar cook with more nutrient rich food. For example, the other day at work, we had a lunch meeting that was catered with vegetarian enchiladas. They were AMAZING. Had a really nice kick to them, and the filling was cauliflower, cornmeal mush, butternut squash, black beans, spinach, onions, peppers, etc... only a tiny bit of cheese on the very top. They were some of the most amazing things I've ever tasted, and super super healthy. This last weekend, I tried to duplicate the recipe and came really close - I didn't get enough spice into them, so I need to play with that, but it was DELICIOUS even still... and about 300 calories per serving and full of wonderful nutrients. Not a drop of butter.

See it as a challenge (also, you could be setting your kids up for failure, if they are only used to the kinds of food you're currently making, those are the kinds of foods they'll eat as they get older and - as most of us do - likely become "less active." Teach them that prepared correctly, healthy foods are AMAZINGLY great.

You're trying to rationalize why you're overweight

^

This sounds like the same kind of justification my husband falls back on. "We don't eat garbage, almost everything is homemade. We eat better than anyone else I know, so I don't know why..."

I can kneed bread all day but the work I put into making it doesn't make it calorie-free. Nor does making brownies from scratch vs from a box. Sure, you might be saving yourself on things like preservatives, artificial flavorings and sodium, but those things are in there as flavor enhancers and fillers. Most of the time you're just replacing that stuff with more butter, more salt, more sugar, more chocolate which just means upping the calorie count.

It's like fat vegetarians {looks in the mirror}. Just because I don't eat meat doesn't automatically mean my diet is any healthier than a meat eater's. You can eat nothing but candy bars and still call yourself a vegetarian.

If you're fine with your weight, that's great, but don't kid yourself that because you slaved away in the kitchen that it's any healthier by default.

Learn to substitute. Monday I made vegetarian Shepard's Pie. I "saved" a ton of calories by replacing about 1/3rd of the potato with roasted cauliflower, skipping the cheese, reducing the butter and bulking up the "meat" layer with carrots, peppers and celery {further reducing the size of the "potato" layer}. Next time I'll do half and half with the cauliflower/potato mash and cut the butter even more since the roasted cauliflower lends a nice rich flavor of its own. Still feels as decadent as my normal version, but the calorie count is much kinder for a "meat and potatoes" sort of comfort food.

Even when I do prepared foods I tweak. Box of flavored rice? I add a cup of plain quinoa, a bag of veggie crumbles and a bag of broccoli or cauliflower. Now a 4-serving side dish is an 8-serving meal. At first look, I only save a few calories, but I've slashed the sodium levels and reduced the superfluous calories I would have added if I'd kept the everything separate and added butter/sauce and the oil I would have needed to prep the "meat". Plus using the crumbles means I didn't resort to a heavier option like the "sauced" or "breaded" vegetarian meat replacements, which are significantly higher in calories and sodium.

As far as counting calories for home made stuff, I plug in my stuff as I make it using this recipe calculator. http://recipes.sparkpeople.com/recipe-calculator.asp I like to cook things so I have leftovers for days, so I like to measure out entire packages and then divide the entire meal into servings. There's usually plenty of time to do that as I'm sweating veggies, preheating or waiting for water to boil. Then I write down the meal and calories per serving in a little file on my desktop so I only have to think about the recipe once. I just plug in the pre-configured calories into MFP as needed.