How to stay motivated without spouse help

Do everything you can during the hours you are not home together. ..it's a good start.

It seems simple, but just do you. Nothing drastic needs to happen. Eat the same things as them but just less of it. Encourage them to do things together like going on walks. If they refuse, establish that this is important to you whether they support the journey or not.

One key thing though, is not to over-saturate your conversations with talk of weight loss. If someone is not partaking in your journey with you, they probably don't want to hear it either. It's a hard thing to accept, but this is your journey and your's alone. Some folks become really offended that their significant other doesn't comment on their progress, but it basically boils down to this.

So here is my current situation for reference: I am trying to lose weight, get back into running, and try to generally eat as healthy as I can (but not a food nazi by any means). My husband knows my goals, but does not eat healthy and is not trying to lose weight. I do all of the cooking in our household because hamburger help for dinner every single night just doesn't fly for me.....

Make sure he understands what you goals are, how you plan to get there, and why it is important to you without implying he has to do the same thing. It is completely possible for him to be supportive of you without actually partaking in the journey himself (you know, like pregnancy and childbirth, just less screaming, hopefully ....) It can also be quite helpful to make a few active friends with similar goals as you on here for additional support.

It will probably be easiest for you if you stay away from food/food group restriction diets and just figure out how to work the foods you already normally would eat into you calorie count. For me I just do what I would consider a typical balanced meal with a meat, a carb (I have found that backing off on my carbs and filling up on meat and veggies keeps me fuller for less calories, but I definitly am not low/no carb), and lots of veggies.

A few tricks I have learned over my journey:
- Meal timing can be a big deal for some people. I am happier when I wait later in the day to eat breakfast, and I love a big dinner. So that has worked well for me in I stay lighter on my calories throughout the day and then when I am home with hubs for dinner we have a nice meal together.
- healthy cooking doesn't have to be an art, most of what I eat now is what I ate before, I just found little things along the way to help cut a couple calories here and there to make it lighter
- Veggies Veggies Veggies, you can make a nice calorie dense meal for the family and partake in a portion and fill up the rest of the way with veggies.
-Ground turkey makes a pretty good substitution for ground beef, and is typically cheaper, so I put that in tacos, spaghetti, lasagna, or anything else I would use ground beef in that isn't just a hamburger. I have found that helps make these meals a little lower calorie for me and still acceptable for hubs. Ground chicken just doesn't have the right flavor to replace beef for us, but maybe you would like it?

It can be done. When I first started on my path, hubby wasn't ready to do anything. It took about 8 months of me doing stuff for him to finally jump on the wagon too.

Do whatever you need to do to keep yourself on track. I still have a "snack box" of 100-ish calorie snacks for when I get hungry. I can raid the box without feeling guilty. What's funny is that my daughters have started doing that too - with the pretzels, and the string cheese in the dorm fridge - yogurt, and applesauce. It's funny how they started picking up on it and doing that too.

I have low cal breakfast and lunches. Save the calories for dinner as I'm not the one cooking them