Getting Healthy Enough To Make A Healthy Baby

My wife and I are on a pretty serious health kick ahead of trying for a baby. Certain diet plans suggest that publically charting your progress is a great way to improve the diets effectiveness. I am sure you guys don’t want to read about my weekly weight loss so I will post dieting ideas and recipes to add flavour (pun intended). I would love to hear from you guys to see what you think and what you do when you have a health kick.

Having swotted up on being healthy ahead of trying for a baby, it seems that while weight loss is on the agenda it is not going to be my biggest concern. My wife and I are both in the upper 10% of our BMI scale, flirting with the barrier between ‘normal’ and ‘overweight’.

While losing weight is important, healthy living is really the prime concern according to my research. As I have said before, I hate fruit and veg and don’t have the time to exercise due to my current working pattern – this, it seems, is where the problem is.

So, what have I done to improve things? Well having looked at my life I found these major issues:

1) No exercise – literally. I have to drive to work, I don’t have time to play sport these days and I play on my PC or watch DVD’s for fun (health)

2) No fruit and veg – I rarely made my 5 a day (health)

3) Snacks and takeaways (health and diet)

4) Portion sizes (diet)

5) Saturated fat intake (health and diet)

6) To many calories per day (diet)

7) White bread, pasta and rice (health and diet)

Having identified these points as the areas I needed to fix, I came up with the following solutions:

1) Making the time for a 30 to 60 minute walk 4-6 days a week and a set of press ups and sit ups before bed. It’s not exactly great exercise – but it’s a good start and a lot better than nothing.

2) Since pushing through the baby fear barrier my wife and I have a new motto: ‘Cowboy up’. This also applies to my attitude towards fruit and veg. I’ve started eating veg I don’t like and we are doubling the amount of veg in our dinners. I am working on the fruit side but need to do some shopping. Pineapples, oranges and raisins will be on the agenda. This has meant that I have gone from eating three or four of my five a day to totally blitzing it (I am closer to six or seven now).

3) Snacks and takeaways. NO NO NO NO – Cowboy up 😉

4) It turns out that my wife and I are probably eating anywhere between 25-50% too much food for dinner and lunch. This has been cut back. To make room for the added veg, meat is significantly reduced as are the carbs. Lunch is now 300g of healthy soup with 1 slice of bread.

5) A few years ago my wife went on the ‘Slimming World’ diet and lost a load of weight. One of the major principles is to try and eliminate as much fat and saturated fat from your diet as possible – as well as other things of course. As a result, cheese, olive oil, butter, ready meals, pizza, high fat content food, and all food with saturated fat is out.

6) As my portion sizes have been through the roof, eating ‘normal’ sized portions does give a calorie deficit, but it only brings me down to what I should be eating. Without the snacks I like (including milk before bed) this gets me the recommended 200-300 calorie deficit that is considered optimal for dieting.

7) It turns out brown bread/rice/pasta actually fills you up more and for longer which means you eat less than if you were eating white bread/rice/pasta. It’s also much healthier.

So that’s the initial plan for the diet and in two weeks I’ve lost 4lbs. Let’s hope it continues because we want to start trying in December. This means I need to lose about 1-1.5 stone (14-21lbs) and about 5-10% of my body fat in 3 months. I sense I have a long way to go!

I will keep a regular post about the fight with healthy eating as well as some of my hints and tips. Please, please post me your ideas on healthy eating and dieting ideas.

-Chris