Non-participating Spouse
I'm loving my low carb lifestyle. The food is full of flavor, satisfying, and for the most part, eating low carb is even easy in restaurants. The only real challenge I've run into is my husband. He hasn't done the research I have and he's still convinced that he needs the carbohydrates but, at least for him, he typically burns enough of them in a day that I can't really argue with him about it.
The challenge has been this, we love to cook. Cooking has always been a team sport/source of entertainment for us. We like to try new things but there are a handful of favorites that we've established and of course, they are high carb. He keeps trying to default to these and I keep trying to push us away from them. A few of them have substitutions that can be made to make them low carb but not all and I can tell he's feeling kind of cheated. 😟(Sorry, Love.)
When I'm doing the cooking it's easy. He'll eat pretty much anything I put in front of him. But when he does the cooking, I feel horrible for rejecting or complaining about not being able to eat something he's prepared.
It's funny because really, low carb is simpler than what we usually prepare. Just some meat and some vegetables, and I'm happy. No need to spend 2 hours in the kitchen making something fancy. Maybe that's the part he misses.
Apparently, I'm not the only one with this problem. I found this article over at the Paleo non Paleo blog. 27 Ways To Live With Your Non-Paleo Spouse. A lot of it I'm already doing and it looks like just about the only thing I can do at this point would be to do 100% of the cooking and shopping and meal planning. Not quite sure I'm up for that just yet.
Something I read in the article was actually quite surprising to me and I didn't even consciously realize my intent...I want him to be low carb too. Not just to accommodate me. I really do think it's the healthier way to go. Carbs are junk, and I want both of us to be as healthy as we can. Now that I've realized that my goal is conversion, not just acceptance, I think I can make more progress. First thing is to make a new list of favorites and go-to recipes. That may require I do the majority of the cooking for awhile, but we'll get there.
Number 10 on the list was also an eye opener. "Don’t encourage non-paleo (in this case high-carb) eating". The last time we went to the store together, I got the meat, veggies, and dairy items that were on the list and then I said, "Are there any carbs you want?" There weren't any on my list and I thought I was being fair...if I hadn't asked though, we probably would have gotten home before he even realized there weren't any. So, I guess in the future, I just won't ask but of course if he makes a request, I'm not going to deny it. It is still his choice to be high-carb if he wants.
For now. 😉
Post a Comment