4 Ways to Get Your Family Fit
When it comes to managing a healthy weight, find strength in numbers. Here’s how to get your whole family into the act.
Written by Vera Tweed
Losing weight is a lot less lonely when you do it with others.
Even if your kids or spouse don’t need to lose weight, adopting weight-friendly habits can be a boon to everyone’s health. Plus, when all of you follow a similar diet and exercise program, you may find you’re far less tempted and more motivated, and actually enjoy the healthier versions of family time, especially when they include more outdoor exercise and less TV. And, if you’d like to see your kids maintain a healthy weight themselves, you’ve got to be a role model, says Ivy Larson, a certified ACSM health fitness trainer and cooking instructor whose latest book is Whole Foods Diet Cookbook (Gibbs Smith, 2009). “Research shows that children are often more willing to eat nutritious foods and be active if they see their parents and other family members embrace a healthy lifestyle,” she says.
As a rule, Larson recommends simply providing healthy meals and snacks and not worrying about the serving sizes. However, she stresses that junk food and the size of sweet treats should be limited. When a child is obese, a trained professional should be consulted before limiting calories in the child’s diet.
Here are Larson’s top tips for improving wellness—and maintaining a healthy weight—at home.
1) Keep Portions In Proportion.
To make sure your meal is proportioned for optimal health, divide your plate this way:
• 1/3 vegetables and/or fruits (eat as many nonstarchy vegetables as you like since they’re naturally low in calories).
• 1/3 fiber-rich whole-food carbohydrates, such as whole-grain pasta or bread, brown rice, beans, corn, potatoes, lentils, peas, oatmeal or barley.
• 1/3 heart-healthy protein that is low in saturated fat, such as lean cuts of meat, eggs (preferably enriched with omega-3s), fish, low-fat organic dairy, or skinless white-meat turkey or chicken.
2) Be Picky About Who You Invite To Dinner.
Making a conscious effort to add health-promoting foods to your family’s diet (and eliminate the not-so-healthy foods) can go a long way toward meeting your collective healthy-weight goals. Here’s our list of foods to consider family “friends” and “foes”—and those you should never invite in the first place.
Family Friends
(enjoy these in addition to fruits and vegetables)
• Flaxseeds and/or flax oil
• Fish
• Whole-food dense carbs, such as whole grains, beans and legumes
• Nuts and seeds
Family Foes
(limit these)
• Sugar
• Refined flour (enriched or bleached) and foods made with refined flour
• Saturated fat found in animal foods
• Processed vegetable oils such as corn oil, “pure” vegetable oil, soybean oil and cottonseed oil, which are empty, unhealthy calories because they are stripped of nutrients during processing.
• Foods made with preservatives and additives (choose foods made with ingredients you recognize and can pronounce).
Uninvited Guests
(eliminate these completely)
• Trans fats (hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils), found in many margarines, processed foods and vegetable shortening
• Fried foods
• High-fructose corn syrup
3) Find Ways To Use Fit Fats.
Each meal should include a healthy fat, and one of these should be flaxseeds or flax oil. For cooking, use either high oleic canola, safflower or sunflower oil (they have a high smoke point), or extra virgin olive oil. For recipes that don’t require heat, use flax oil, expeller-pressed canola oil, extra virgin olive oil or walnut oil. Olive oil boosts the body’s ability to use healthy omega-3 fats, and the other oils are all good sources of omega-3s.
4) Exercise.
Get the whole family moving and have fun by adding more physical activities to weekend plans, such as hikes, bike rides and swimming together at the community pool. Weekdays, Mom and Dad may need to ramp up their workouts to reach their weight-loss goals. Try a 30-minute workout three times a week that includes the combination of aerobic and resistance exercises often referred to as interval training. After warming up, do a few minutes of aerobic exercise to raise your heart rate, then one or more resistance exercises, then more aerobic activity and so on, keep?ing your heart rate elevated while doing strength-training exercises that work all the major muscle groups. To save time, do one set to failure rather than multiple sets.
Quick Tip
Whole flaxseeds will keep at room temperature for up to a year. Grind them in a coffee grinder or food processor when it’s time to use them.
Extra Support for Mom and Dad’s Weight-Loss Goals
Sometimes, the best intentions will only take you so far. That’s when a little extra help can mean the difference between the scale’s going up or down. Let these products help eliminate some of the detours on your road to healthy weight.
♦ Celsius Orange
The combination of natural thermogenic ingredients in this soda (such as EGCG and caffeine) makes fat-burning easy.
♦ Natural Factors PGX Daily
This blend of natural fibers makes you feel full sooner so you consume fewer calories.
♦ MHP XPEL When you want to lose weight fast, try XPEL’s gentle yet effective water-loss formula that goes to work immediately.
♦ Bragg Apple Cider Vinegar
Consuming apple cider vinegar with meals helps reduce hunger by stabilizing blood sugar.
♦ Himalaya GlucoCare
The 25 herbs in this formula help keep blood sugar under control and regulate metabolism of fats.
