When Lakeena King’s mom would get home from work, she would snoop in the kitchen garbage. She would spy the candy wrappers or chip bags, and it was on.

“I told you I didn’t want those girls eating chips. Why did you give them those chips?” she would ask her mother.

“Those girls have to eat what they want,” King’s grandmother would say. If asked about the vegetables in the trash, Granny blew off her daughter’s concerns. “If they don’t want to eat that stuff, they don’t have to.”

Nearly every night it was the same argument.

“It would be really funny to watch them argue about what we ate,” King said.

By third grade, King was already getting a little heavy like her mom, although her younger sister took after their grandmother -- she could eat whatever she wanted and stay as thin as a rail. And, boy, they ate what they wanted with Granny.

Twinkies with vanilla ice cream, soda, chips – their grandmother would sneak them whatever snacks they wanted.

Her mom would question her when she got home: “Are you hungry? What did you eat?” King would try to lie about it, but her mom would have already seen the evidence in the trash. She often tried to explain to her daughters that snack foods were a reward, and not to be eaten all the time.

“Granny would say, ‘No, snacks are what you eat,’“ King said with a laugh. Her weight didn’t bother her too much in grade school. She was surrounded by a lot of people who loved her and supported her, and many people in her family were overweight, too. She started noticing it more when they would go shopping for school clothes in middle school. Or when she realized that she ran slower than the other kids.

King, now 27, works as a nurse and also attends beauty school in St. Louis. When she crossed over 200 pounds, she knew it was time to change.

She joined a gym and hired a personal trainer. She worked out hard in the gym, but she told her trainer that her biggest problem was going to be with food. Her trainer started teaching her how to eat healthier.

The first place that dietary change happens is not the kitchen. It’s the grocery store. So King’s trainer went grocery shopping with her. She taught her how to cook a variety of vegetables, like cauliflower, greens and squash, in a way that she would actually enjoy eating them. King started adding a lot more vegetables into her diet, and the weight started coming off.

But fast food was her weakness. She talked to her boyfriend and asked him not to eat it in front of her. Sometimes, they would take a different route home to avoid passing by certain fast food places.

She said she doesn’t blame her grandparents for her weight struggles.

“They just wanted to see their grandbabies happy,” she says.

But oftentimes, those who love us the most can be the ones who sabotage our food choices. Whether it’s a spouse, parent or grandparent, learning to work around that relationship can be the most critical part of improving your family’s diet. Setting boundaries with an enabler may be the one thing that helps sustain lasting change.

King said improving the presentation and seasoning of vegetables she had been served as a child would have made her more likely to eat them.

“I didn’t want to eat them because they didn’t taste good,” she said. It makes sense. Her tastes had been influenced by the heavily spiced, deep-fried food her grandmother enjoyed eating. She is continuing to work on improving her diet and losing weight. I asked her how she might handle the same situation with an indulgent grandparent when she has children.

“I think I would react the same way my mom did,” King said. “But I definitely would feed them before we go see her, so they don’t eat as many snacks. If that won’t work, they just wouldn’t see Granny as much.”

I did not want to die choking on a piece of chicken-fried steak. But there I was, gasping for air in the fifth-grade lunchroom, the eyes of all my peers glued to my contorted face.

The noisy cafeteria, filled with more than a hundred students laughing and talking over one another, grew silent as my coughing became louder. That was when Mr. Davis sprung into action. He was sitting at the teachers' table, where I had been staring while I struggled to breathe. I saw him shove the remaining bite of his sandwich into his mouth and sprint over toward me. He wrapped his arms around my small frame, pressed his arms into my stomach and forcefully thrust.

The rubbery bite of steak flew out of my mouth. The crisis averted, my classmates went back to their sandwiches and Little Debbie snacks. I silently wished for a sinkhole to appear in the cafeteria and swallow me into the bowels of the building.

It was years before I could approach chicken-fried steak again. But I've never forgotten Mr. Davis' quick-witted heroism. When I think about my most memorable elementary school teachers, he comes to mind first.

I asked a few dozen people to describe their favorite elementary school teachers. Some of them were decades removed from that era of their lives, others much younger. Yet nearly everyone had an answer pretty quickly. Some of them were like Mr. Davis, who performed a memorable act of kindness. One attorney told me about Mr. Hogan, his kindergarten teacher, who dropped him off at home one day when his mother didn't pick him up after school.

His sister recalled an incident with Miss Rosa, her first-grade teacher. Her parents had invited Miss Rosa to their home for dinner when they heard how nice she had been to their daughter when she refused to eat green eggs and ham on religious grounds during a lesson on Dr. Seuss. After the dinner, her mother mentioned how sweet Miss Rosa was, and made an offhand remark about her appearance.

The next day at school, Miss Rosa asked what her mother had said after the dinner. The young girl innocently replied, "She said you were chubby."

"Miss Rosa died laughing," the woman recalled. "She never got offended."

The most effective teachers, the ones who advance their students' learning the most, aren't always the kindest, funniest or most charismatic. But they all make a lasting impression on young children.

"Great teaching seems to have less to do with our knowledge and skills than with our attitude toward our students, our subject and our work," wrote educator Maria Orlando in an essay in Faculty Focus.

A study on the traits of exceptional teachers done by Teach For America found that they set big goals for their students, and that they constantly re-evaluate their approaches and techniques in order to improve their effectiveness. They have a relentless focus on improving student achievement, and plan exhaustively and work purposefully toward it. They share the attributes of the most successful students: perseverance and leadership focused on outcomes.

The favorite elementary teachers described to me most often were the ones who made a student feel special, nurtured and valued. Adults talked about the one teacher who encouraged their abilities, helped them see themselves in a different way, or helped them understand a difficult subject. They mentioned kind teachers who managed to be stern and in charge without ever being mean.

Their stories were reflected in the answers my children offered. My son talked about his first-grade teacher, Ms. DePasquale.

"She took everybody's ideas into account," he said. "She was also the most laid-back and funniest, but when she needed to get serious, she was stern."

My daughter said Mr. Kelly, her third-grade teacher, "helped me find new ways of thinking about things." He challenged her.

That was different than what my cousin's wife, Zara, remembered about her favorite elementary teacher. Zara was born in a small town in Pakistan, and her family sent her at a young age to a well-known boarding school to be educated by nuns.

"Sister Mercedes, I remember her so well," Zara said about her first-grade teacher. "I was away from my family, and she was so warm and kind and loving. That was the one thing I needed at that time."

It was one of those days. The house was upside-down, and the kids -- ages 5 and 3 at the time -- wouldn't listen. My list of things to do kept getting longer. Deadlines loomed. I was tired, stressed and felt resentment and self-pity building.

All of a sudden, my most pressing problem became that I had nothing to wear to an upcoming event.

I piled the children in the car and headed to a sale at a favorite boutique. I yelled at them nearly the entire 15 minutes we were in the car. By the time I had them in the double stroller, the youngest had fallen asleep.

I started piling clothes in my arms. We headed to a dressing room. Nearly two hours later, I had bought a purse, a pair of shoes, a top, a pair of pants and two bracelets. And I felt so much better.

I was calmer. I was happier. I was nicer to my sweet children, ready to face dinner, bedtime battles and a late night of working.

It was retail therapy at its worst. I knew the guilt would hit soon enough.

Even though I live within my means and refuse to carry a credit card balance, I'm haunted by my impulse to accumulate more stuff. I hate how much I enjoy buying.

A year and a half ago, I came face-to-face with my dueling inner demons. I swore off buying anything new for myself for an entire year. I told all my friends that I was on a consumption diet and not to call me when they went shopping.

They thought I was nuts. My consumption diet lasted a few months -- until the week before we left for vacation. My outward excuse was that I had nothing appropriate for Florida weather, but I suspect the real reason I binged at Target was because the week before a trip is pure hell for most working parents. You're trying to get extra work done so you're not so far behind when you come back, along with setting up travel logistics, getting the kids packed and making other arrangements. You're exhausted before you arrive at your destination.

There's a documented connection between our emotions and how much we spend. If we are sad, feeling sorry for ourselves or stressed, we shop more. We ignore the other, more responsible voices in our head: Is this stuff made with any consideration for Earth's limited resources? Are the workers paid a fair, living wage? How long before it ends up in a landfill?

Like any temporary, euphoric fix, we are trying to fill a void.

Even before I watched the viral anti-stuff video at storyofstuff.org, I knew I wanted to break this cycle. Intellectually, we know it's a false notion that things can sustain happiness. Lives today are filled with more things than ever, and less happiness. We're filling the world with stuff and throwing fuel on a raging consumption fire.

To anyone who feels the pain of this economy, I don't believe we can spend our way out of this one. We are told that individual consumers keep the economy chugging, and we have internalized that message -- our national spending far outpaces our saving.

I have plans to restart my consumption diet. It's best to take it day by day, week by week. I will consider this list of things that make me happy and don't require a trip to the mall: my children's laughter, a favorite song, a well-told story, a nap, a brisk walk, a conversation with a friend or family member. I vow to think about the consequences beyond limited closet space.

This is a time to invest in experiences, not things.