It's Always a Choice

One of things I really, REALLY hate is feeling deprived.  I enjoy life and want to savor things, and feeling deprived just doesn't fit in with my joie de vivre :-).  That could have easily been a problem for me on Take Shape for Life/Medifast 5/1 if I had chosen to dwell on all of the things that I couldn't eat, so I adopted a different mindset. 

I told myself repeatedly that I could have WHATEVER I wanted, but I was CHOOSING to eat a Medifast meal or a lean & green.  While I was on 5/1, people would say things like, "Oh, you probably can't eat this or that" and I would always respond, "I can eat anything I want, but I'm choosing to eat something healthy instead."

That might sound like a silly thing, but it made a huge difference for me in how I viewed the time I spent losing weight.  Instead of feeling deprived and sorry for myself, and instead of having a "poor me, diet victim" mindset, I found it very empowering to view this as a positive choice I was making.  I didn't allow myself to think in terms of "I can't have this or that," because human nature ALWAYS wants what it can't have.  There is something rebellious in this human nature of ours that rears it's ugly head the moment someone says we can't have something.  So I told myself all the time that I could have anything I wanted, and that it was my choice to eat the things I did.  Saying that not only felt very positive and empowering for me, but it kept me from having people feel sorry for me, which I did NOT want.  It left me feeling in charge of the choices I was making, and it was a reminder to me that it really WAS my choice.

It was my choice to go on this plan.  Nobody made me do it.  I didn't HAVE to go on - I could have chosen to remain 260 pounds (or more) and diabetic.  It was my choice to STAY on plan - nobody made me do that, either.  Every day, every meal, it was my choice to do it or not.

For me, I knew it would be deadly to continually focus on what I couldn't have; I did NOT want to spend the better part of a year looking longingly at plate after plate of "forbidden" food.  Instead I focused on what I was gaining and celebrated each and every good choice that I made.  Sometimes it was a real struggle, I promise you, and sometimes I came perilously close to caving in - but I didn't.  Once each decision was made to stay on plan, I knew it was because I chose to do the right thing and it felt SO good to know I'd walked away from a potential slip.

Today I encourage you to focus on staying positive, even in the way you think about off-plan food.  You already know that that food really isn't your friend (it probably helped you get where you are, and no real friend would do that!), so I'm encouraging you to think positively today.  Embrace the choice that you've made to get healthy, because it really is, and always will be, your choice.  That choice will be either supported or undermined by the choices you make today; choose wisely :-)