Lost: TWENTY POUNDS!!

You should be proud of yourself challenger Kalisah! This is an incredible testament to the benefits of cooking at home. Congratulations to you for bearing the burden of introducing this new habit to your family and congratulations to your husband for making such vast changes to his lifestyle.

I am so excited to report that after two months of cooking at home, my husband has lost more than 20 pounds!

Chip has never had very good eating habits. He is a rather…focused worker, and he will work all day long without ever taking a break to eat, sustaining himself with coffee and diet sodas. By the time I arrived home from work, he was hungry and grouchy, his blood sugar levels completely wacky. Too hungry to wait for dinner to cook, we would rush out to some mid-range family restaurant for dinner.

Extreme hunger forced us to order appetizers, and you know they were never healthy. Fried cheese, nachos, chips and salsa, cheese dip. Chip would practically inhale it. Then he would eat his entree and whatever I didn’t finish of mine, washing it all down with several diet sodas, of course. We’d often order a dessert for the family to split. It’s hard to resist a chocolate brownie sundae with the photo of it right there on the tabletent.

This has been Chip’s eating pattern for all of his working adult life.

When I lost my job, cooking at home was to be one way that we would cut household expenses. I’ve never been much of a cook so I was dubious at first. But I found some recipes online and I set at it. It went well, actually. Both Chip and our 16-year-old son Elijah approved of my efforts and it boosted my confidence. I spread my wings. I ventured out. I bought lunch food.

I began making turkey wraps, caesar salads, soup, or just heating up leftovers for Chip’s lunch. He’d be toiling away with his head down, often never even looking up or acknowledging the plate of food I put beside him. But he ate it. I brought him snacks of apple slices, cubed cheese, grapes, whole grain crackers, Crystal Lite tea, and he ate it.

And come dinner time, he wasn’t starving and cracked out on caffeine with loopy blood sugar levels. And his portions changed substantially. He ate one chicken breast instead of two and a half. He never went back for seconds. At first I was offended — I thought he didn’t like what I’d cooked. But then I could see he was completely satisfied by one serving.

Then one day, Chip — ever the obsessive weigher — told me that he’d lost more than 20 pounds. He wanted to go buy a new bathroom scale; he thought something was wrong with ours. But I can see it in his face, which is a completely different shape than it’s been for the past 15 years. His metabolism is no longer all out of whack from the starvation he had forced upon it. And he did it without removing any particular food groups from his diet. No wacky fad diets. Just cooking at home. I’m so proud of him.

I’m proud of me.