Guest Post by Mark: My role in my wife's fitness and weight loss.

by Mark

This is my first stab at guest blogging, so my plan is to keep quality low to maintain room for improvement in later posts.  Perhaps later I will be able to touch on the climbing and homeschooling topics that came up in the responses to the bleg.  

While Erin and I were sharing the driving to Estes Park,  we discussed my role in her exercise and weight loss successes.   This isn't advice for other husbands per se, but perhaps my experience might be useful to others as they go about supporting a loved one in achieving significant life changes.  

I came up with ten specific things I did to support my wife.   She claims that I didn't do anything to undermine her efforts, but I'm skeptical that everything I did was helpful.  I assume that most of the readers are familiar with her story, so I'll skip over the  parts of the story where she decided to start exercising, and focus on my response.   

Here is what I did:

1) I said “yes” the first time. When Erin asked if we could change our family schedule so that she could get two workouts every week, I said yes without hesitation.  I wasn't sure  what we would cut out to make the time, but I just assumed that we could make it happen.

2)    Then I said nothing for a long time.  Erin was inflexible in her schedule  because she feared that if she missed any workouts, she might let them all slide.  I didn't like this, but  since she was really going to the gym and working hard, I kept quiet about my desires for more flexibility.      

3)    I listened, or at least pretended to, every day.  After the exercise program was in full swing, Erin decided to stop being a glutton.  At this point ALL of her conversation topics were about food.  I listened to her talk about calorie counting, I listened to reviews of diet books.  I heard about how many almonds she ate for a snack, and I smiled and thought about skiing while she rambled on about serving sizes.  I realized that if Erin was going to change her eating forever, then she was going to have to be obsessive about it for a long time.  I smiled, acted engaged, and asked just enough questions to keep the appearance of engagement.  In truth, I felt a bit of awe towards Erin on this front.  I have always been prone to fixate on topics, but Erin's  focus on her eating habits was unlike anything I had ever seen.  This was single-mindedness like I had never seen.

4)    I pushed her to explicitly enumerate her "eating rules."   Erin came up with lots of great rules for her weight loss, but she would lose track of them.  Erin is a firm believer that calorie counting works for her weight loss, but it takes a tremendous amount of effort to really count every morsel and crumb.  The rules are a short hand way of keeping food intake in  control without having to scribe everything in a notebook.

5)    I looked at Erin's weight chart every morning.  Erin plotted her weight on a chart that she kept on the bathroom counter.  I could glance at this and know how things were going without having to ask.  She and I are both data lovers, so this was a great tool.

6)    I did the statistics. Erin was always worried that “it” would stop working at some point.  I mean that she was so used to diet failures that she could not truly internalize the idea that the weight loss was really something she had control of, but instead her emotional reaction was as if it was something that was happening to her.  This manifested itself as a fear that anytime her weight ticked up ½ pound she would panic and announce that “it had stopped.”  

My response was to do a regression analysis on her weight loss data and use it to estimate the normal variation in her weight.  I used this to say that either “No, you didn't stop.  This is just noise.” or “Yes you did stop, get back on habit.”  Once she got to maintenance mode, I set up a statistical process control (SPC) chart for her using modified Westinghouse rules.

Erin had lots of experience trying to lose weight, but she had never really had a long period of holding steady at a lower weight.  In the past the weight loss was always followed immediately by either a pregnancy or by simple regaining of the pounds.    With the control chart she could add or subtract rules depending on if she was gaining or losing weight after she had reached her goal.  The Westinghouse rules also kept her from over reacting to small, random swings in weight.     

7)    Coaching.  I learned early that I had a simple but critical role.  It was a blend of the Socratic method and tactics of the secret police.  At the dinner table, Erin usually gave me a stream of consciousness dump of her day's activities.  In the moments that I was really listening, I would take notice of anything that was out of line with her rules. If she said she made pretzels at Hannah's and ate two, then I noted the white flour and snacking behavior.  If she ate bedtime snack or grabbed leavings from the kid's plates, I would note that too.  I would not mention them if she was still losing weight, but if her weights stopped dropping, then I would ask her if she had been following her rules.  If she said yes, then I would recount the “violations” I had noted for the week.  In truth she usually knew if she had been “cheating” and me just asking the question would bring out her own recount of the weeks dietary misdemeanors.  Sometimes, however,  she was not aware. 

 (I tried calorie counting recently just out of curiosity.  It lasted all of 5 hours because it is REALLY hard to keep track of what you eat.  Having someone spy on you helps.)  

8)     I excluded Erin's new clothes from the family budget.  Typically we would have a line item for clothes for everyone and Erin is in charge of keeping us on track.    Erin fretted because she needed  new size 6 clothes to bridge her between her starting point and her final size.  She hated to buy new clothes because it was a lot of money and she would not wear them long.  It felt wasteful to her to have a “temporary” wardrobe.  I told her that she had three options:  We could save money by having her gain the weight back; she could go naked; or she could buy whatever she needed even if she didn't wear it long.  I had to remind her to feel positive about this since needing new clothes was a tangible outcome of her success.

9)    Compliments on Erin's appearance. She liked knowing that I could notice  her slimming down.  

10)    I stopped asking for “trigger foods” to be on the shopping list.  There are some foods that Erin has a really hard time not snacking on, so I just gave them up so that she would not be tempted.  This really wasn't a big deal for me.  We have always done a lot of our dietary management at the shopping list level, so I was used to not having things around that we didn't want to overconsume.   

11)    I split plates with her when we went out to eat.  I let her pick whatever she wanted, then I would plan to eat half and fill out the rest of my order with appetizers, salads, or if I was really hungry, another entree.  Erin learned early that for her, the strategy of ordering a full meal and taking half home didn't work.  The second half didn't make it to the doggy bag, so it was better to get it off her plate right at the start of the meal.

   There you have it.     Maybe next time I'll write a post on risk tolerance, risk mitigation, and who not to hire if you want to spend an afternoon in the mountains in Utah.  

Comments

[Cathie B]

Erin - what an awesome idea. Mark - it is fun to look into the psychology of husbandry. I'm quite sure that Kevin does similar things (listens, kind of... catching the important things).

This was great!

[Jamie]

My response was to do a regression analysis on her weight loss data and use it to estimate the normal variation in her weight.

Love it!

[Charlotte (Matilda)]

Thank you, Mark, for sharing your perspective. Lots to think about here!

[Martha]

This is very helpful. Erin, is there a post somewhere in which you list the eating rules you developed for yourself? I looked through the chronological index and didn't see them.

[karyn]

This was really helpful. I'm always asking my husband for help with my weight loss and he tries but I think he and I are not sure exactly how he can help. This post gives some good tips!

[bearing]

Martha, there is a short series about the habits (not really rules) for weight loss and maintenance. The introduction is here:

http://arlinghaus.typepad.com/blog/2009/05/a-short-series-my-failurefree-reallife-habit-constellation-for-weight-loss.html

[brooke]

This was really great.

[hmm]

"she could go naked;"
that option has potential, no?

[bearing]

hmm, not for this body that's given birth 4x!

[lisa]

So, she talked a lot, and you pretended to listen.

You're a prince.

[bearing]

@Lisa: Yup, he's pretty great. :-)

I don't think it comes through in Mark's writing how very, very much his patient attention, which he's described honestly, helped me.

I lost forty pounds that year, something I never managed to do before. I owe a lot of it to the help he offered when I finally asked for it.