Friday, September 18, 2009

A Day in the Life of Maintenance

I'm going to warn you up front that I'm going to talk a bit about food today, so if you're feeling particularly vulnerable, you might want to skip today's post. It's not that I am trying to tempt anyone to stray, but I know that some of you reading this are in maintenance, so today mostly applies to you (maybe) :-).

My husband, son and I are heading to Chicago this morning for a day at the Museum of Science and Industry. Chicago is about a 2-1/2 hr. drive from my home, so it's a very do-able day trip. I grew up in the south suburbs of the Windy City and loved going to the Museum of Science and Industry, so I'm very much looking forward to the day. Our son (22-1/2) has been a huge Harry Potter fan for years and even looked a lot like the young wizard when he was in middle school, complete with the haircut and round glasses. We didn't set out to copy the Harry Potter look, but our son looked enough like Harry Potter to make more than a few people do a double-take when they'd see him. Anyway, the Museum of Science and Industry has a special Harry Potter exhibition right now, which is why we're making a day trip there.

Since my husband lost 50 pounds on Take Shape for Life/Medifast and our son lost 60 pounds, in addition to my own 126 pound loss, we've packed crunch bars, pretzels and puffs for the day. We've done this for two reasons. First of all, we don't want to spend money on food at the museum - it's expensive and not that great. Bringing our own stuff with us will save a lot of money as well as a lot of calories.

And saving calories today is important, because we're heading to the restaurant that originated the now-famous deep-dish Chicago pizza. This particular restaurant has been featured in a couple of different Food Network programs, and since it's just ten miles from the museum, we're going to check it out!

That's the fun part about being in maintenance - we CAN do this and completely enjoy the experience. We've learned how to pay attention to our "full" signals, so there's no worry that we'll be miserable as we finally push away from the table. In fact, I went on line and checked out the menu and I already know that I'll order a large green salad to accompany the pizza.

That's part of how we do maintenance in our family. The deep-dish pizza will certainly be a rare treat, as we almost never eat pizza. But preceding our dinner will be several Medifast meals, ensuring that we're getting in lots of great nutrition while, at the same time, helping us manage our calories, fat grams and carbs. After our pizza meal tonight, tomorrow we'll be a little extra careful with what we eat, and I'm sure our dinner will be a very simple lean and green.

Everyone's plan for maintenance will look a little different, and that's OK because we're all different with different levels of activity - and we all have different metabolisms. No matter how we each do maintenance, there is room in all of our lives on the other side of goal for an occasional all-out splurge, and tonight my splurge will be a slice or two of deep-dish Chicago pizza. Life this side of goal is good, so hurry up and get there :-).

For those of you on 5&1 who made it to the end of this blog :-), hang in there and keep up the great work! You're getting there, one committed day at a time!

Who's committed to an on-plan day today?

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