I'm Confused . . .

I need some help today to understand something. I've heard this over and over again and I'm just a bit confused. Anybody want to help me out?

Here's what has me confused: I've heard from several people lately who were on plan and doing well at one point, but now say that they're too busy to stay on plan right now and will get back to 5&1 when things settle down.

Maybe it's because I found Take Shape for Life/Medifast to be the easiest plan I ever did, but I'm frankly at a loss to understand how it's possible to be too busy to grab a packet (or, more simply, a crunch bar or a bag of pretzels or cheese puffs). I am assuming that regardless of how busy we are, at some point in our day we do eventually put something in our mouths, right? Even though I'm in maintenance, if I have a crazy-busy day, I'll eat Medifast meals throughout the day. I may be too busy to fix something else, but I have bars, pretzels or cheese puffs with me wherever I am, and I always have water.

Here's what I *think* might really be going on, based on my own past experience with food. When I'd get really busy and that busyness resulted in lots of extra stress, it wasn't so much that I didn't have time to diet as it was that I didn't want to. I rationalized that being extra busy and stressed meant I "deserved" to take a break and treat myself - I deserved to eat what I wanted and reward myself because I was working so hard.

I'm not meaning to be at all harsh or difficult here, and I hope that those of you who've read my blogs for a while have gotten a glimpse of my heart and know how much I care about people and how much I want everyone to get to a healthy weight. I struggled with morbid obesity for so many years and I know how hard it is to change entrenched habits. Past attempts at losing weight were always subject to the whims of weather, mood, how busy I was, etc. etc. The reality is that it didn't take much for me to decide that "today isn't a good diet day" - I cut myself slack all the time. The problem was that life continued to be busy, living in Michigan meant that the weather was often not to my liking, and hormones varied my mood some days moment to moment. It all added up to lots of days that weren't "good diet days."

Funny thing happened, however. One day I was ready - really ready - to make a change in my life. I made the fundamental decision to get to a healthy weight. Once I did that, my life didn't slow down, the weather in Michigan didn't improve, and my hormones . . . don't even go there! Only this time none of this mattered when it came to whether or not I was going to stay on plan. That certainly doesn't mean it was easy, because sometimes it was incredibly hard and sometimes the last thing I wanted to do in the morning was face a day filled with 5 Medifast meals and a "boring lean and green." But even being tired of the program didn't alter the fact that I'd made a fundamental choice to get healthy. As a result, as each challenge came (and trust me, they came), I figured out what I needed to do to stay on plan.

In the end, whether or not we choose to stay on plan probably depends less on how busy our schedule is and more on whether or not we've made the decision to just do it. The choice is yours . . . choose wisely :-)