Is Your Family Making You Fat?

If you have obese parents, there is a greater chance that you will be obese yourself. There may be a genetic component involved, but since you are unable to alter your genes more attention has to be given to environmental and social factors. If you were obese as a child it may have been because your parents were overindulgent and allowed you to eat lots of junk food and didn't try to encourage you to exercise. You may take these habits with you into adulthood and find yourself with an even worse weight problem. However, at some point you have to take responsibility for your own actions and make changes to your lifestyle if you want to lose weight.

Unfortunately, altering your thought patterns and developing healthier habits can be easier said than done when you seek comfort in the familiar. If you have been raised to expect large meals and plenty of junk food snacks, it can be difficult to reduce portion sizes and make an effort to control your eating. Your inclination is going to be to eat too much because this is what you have always done and since this is normal behaviour for you, you may not even realise that your eating habits are particularly bad. It may take for you to join a slimming club or seek advice online or from a doctor for you to realise that you need to address your behaviour.

This isn't easy to do when you're surrounded by overweight relatives for whom consuming large quantities of food and sitting around all day is the norm. You may want to break from your bad habits and develop healthier ones so that you can start losing weight, but then find that your family either unwittingly or maliciously sabotage your efforts. It may be comments that you're looking too slim, even though you are yet to reach a healthy weight, or the extra servings of food you receive when you go to your parents' house for a family meal. Losing weight is hard, anyway, but when you don't have the support of your family it becomes at least 10 times harder.

It might be more difficult to control your weight when you live with your parents and they provide you with food at meal times, because you don't feel in a position to ask for less food or for something else to eat and so you just accept it. When you live alone you should be better able to control your diet, although that doesn't mean you won't revert back to the old habits with which you are so familiar and which provide you with comfort. Perhaps, you're married and have your own family and find that controlling your weight is extremely challenging when you have fussy, young children and a partner who is unsympathetic about the concerns you have with your weight.

It is tempting to blame your family for making you fat and although your relatives may contribute to your weight issues, you have to face up to the fact that it is up to you to make changes in your life if you are unhappy with your weight. No one is forcing you to eat a whole tub of ice cream or to serve double the amount of pasta you need at dinner time. When it comes to exercise you may not have very much time, but even then you should still be able to do something. It all comes down to motivation and willpower. If you really want to lose weight you should be able to find the determination to reduce your calorie intake and increase your activity levels, which is clearly what is needed to help you get back in control of your weight.