Meet the family

Taken 1 week after starting the diet

I am a wife, a mother, and a registered nurse. I work part-time at the local hospital and I homeschool my children. My husband is also a registered nurse and works full time at the local hospital and also pastors the local Primitive Baptist Church. My in-laws also live with us. My family loves to cook and eat.  As a result we are all overweight (except for the youngest child).

We started a family diet on December 1, 2012 after a shopping trip to buy new winter clothes. My husband had to go up a pants size and became very discouraged.  We started eating 1200 cal/day low carb and low sweets.  This has made meal time challenging but fun. I have to keep food  interesting with lots of variety. My kids aren't the chicken nugget, burger kind. For their birthday dinners they ask for steaks and seafood. (however, my youngest, Ava, could eat her weight in McDonald chicken nuggets). In 3 months the family have collectively lost 166 lbs (that's equivalent to 2 1/2 of our children - scary)

I plan on posting recipes we use for our meals.  I basically use normal foods, not diet.  We have replaced finely chopped cauliflower for rice, mashed cauliflower for potatoes and spaghetti squash for pasta.  This saves a ton of calories.  We also use myfittnesspal.com to track our calories. It makes life very easy.

For snacks we eat a lot of 100 cal packs of beef jerky, boiled eggs and pickles. We have also discovered special K pastry snacks and granola squares (both less than 100 cal). Joe, my husband, eats a lot of fish steaks and sardines (the kids and I don't care for those). We have recently found No pudge fudge brownies that are made with yogurt and you can make one brownie at a time. Just be careful not to eat too many sweets because it adds carbs and can slow down weight loss.