Family day activities, the greatest times…but not always

I love family day activities, I love spending time with my kids having some good cheap family fun. Goofing around is the best time.

I love chasing my kids around playgrounds and kicking the soccer ball, dancing around the loungeroom while my boys play air guitar and my daughter sings into her hairbrush.

This is one of the great things about losing weight, I can enjoy all these things without worrying all the time about how fat I am, or that I'm too big to run.

Here's part of a diary entry I wrote just after my second child was born:

"I can't fit down the slide again. The pregnancy weight is still there, and I can't fit down the slide. I want to cry, I want to slide. All that work, even being 7 kilos lighter this time, than when I fell pregnant with Joel, and I still can't slide again. I'm not sure I can do it again"

The thing was now I had 2 kids, and I wanted to get back to where I was before I fell pregnant with the second…I wanted to slide and have fun in the playground, and I wasn't!

I did cry, not then, but later at home, and then I decided that I'd do it one meal, one step, one swing, one hour at a time.

It worked, just like it had last time, I didn't think about being 20 kilos lighter, or about the fact that I couldn't slide now. What I did was refocus on the vision in my head (me fitting down the slide), and then just thought about what I was doing right this very minute.

I just thought abut making the best choice I could with the next mouthful of food. What am I about to eat? Will this help me get down the slide?

Then I'd get on with whatever I was doing. Can I carry this basket in a different way to work my muscles? Can I walk instead of drive? Is what I'm doing helping me?

And when we did go out for some cheap family fun, to the park, to the zoo, to the pool…I focused on what I could do. I can't slide, but I can chase my son (even if it's only for 5 metres) and tickle him.

I can run in the pool while I'm playing with the kids…and I can enjoy the fact that we're having fun together…And I'm losing weight again!

When my daughter was one, I could slide, I could chase my son for hundreds of meters, and I loved it!

Family day activities - the zoo, the park, the pool, soccer in the backyard - are some of my happiest times, they're fun, and they're helping me maintaining my weight, and they're helping me teach and show the kids, that a healthy lifestyle, healthy exercise can also be fun…for it's own sake.

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