Tweaking and Out-Smarting - Again!

I had a rather interesting conversation with a dear friend a couple of days ago. She was on Take Shape for Life/Medifast 5&1 a couple of years ago, lost quite a bit of weight, lost focus and ended up gaining it all back. That's the bad news. The good news is that because she remembered how great she felt on the program and knew she lost weight quickly, when she was finally ready to lose weight again, she came back to this program - didn't even consider anything else.

She's been on the program for about three weeks, and what was interesting was her comment that she was a bit disappointed because she wasn't losing weight as fast this time. I tried to be helpful, so I went over with her what she was eating every day. As it turns out, she was eating her five Medifast meals, having an on-program lean and green, and snacking on baby carrots. She admitted that the snack wasn't exactly on plan, but reasoned that this was a much better choice than eating cookies.

Now while I won't disagree for a minute that eating baby carrots is an infinitely better choice than eating cookies, the reality is that the carrots are still off-plan and were keeping her out of the fat-burning state. As a result, her weight loss, while good, was less than it could have been.

I share this only because this is so like ALL of us . . . we want the results but sometimes don't want to follow the process to get those results. We may try to tweak or otherwise do our own thing with this program, but the honest truth is that if we do, we simply won't get the results we want when we want them. We may decide that we're going to stay on plan during the week and take the weekends off, and we're free to do that, as long as we understand that working the program that way isn't really working the program.

When I started on 5&1, one of the things I loved about this program was knowing that I didn't have to think about what I needed to eat. I didn't have to count anything, just open my packets and make sure I had my lean and green. The simplicity was a welcome relief after years of counting carbs, calories, fat grams or points. I was sick of being obese and ready to follow the program exactly if it promised to get me to a healthy weight. I did and it did :-).

You certainly don't have to follow this program as written - you are free to tweak this in any way that you want. Just tweak away with an awareness that you'll not reach your goal as fast. I shared a story a few weeks ago, but I'll share it again in case some of you missed it. A husband and wife started this program at the same time and both followed 5&1, eating five Medifast meals and their lean and green each day. The only difference was that the husband had a glass of wine every evening and his wife didn't. In the same amount of time that his wife lost 50 pounds, he lost 20 (and men usually lose faster than women!). I don't know about you, but no off-plan food would have been worth taking over twice as long to lose the 126 pounds I needed to lose!

The choice is yours - choose wisely :-)