Yesterday our day with my Facebook friends ended on a very scary note, and I learned once again not to take anything for granted.

We went to a local restaurant on the lakefront for dinner and enjoyed both a great meal and great conversation. Since my friend is on plan and her husband is watching what he eats, no one had anything on their plate that tempted anybody else :-). While we were at the restaurant, it started to rain really hard, then the rain started coming down in a deluge, accompanied by a lot of lightning and very high winds (the wind was so fierce that it blew a tent on the restaurant's patio, set up for a wedding today, into the lake. We decided to order coffee and stay a bit longer at the restaurant in the hope that the rain would subside by the time we left for home. While enjoying our coffee, we heard a lightning strike hit very close by, then the lights in the restaurant went out. The emergency lights came on right away, but things were pretty dark and with no electricity to run the air conditioning, it didn't take long for things to start feeling warm and sticky inside. After a while, we decided to leave and head for home. That's where things got very scary.

We didn't find out until after we got home that in just a few short hours, over 7 inches of rain fell in our area. All we knew shortly after leaving the restaurant was that every street was flooded, and police cruisers had blocked off several streets due to the danger. There were a lot of tree limbs in the road and we saw several stalled cars. My husband kept driving and I kept praying, and we had to reroute ourselves several times to avoid the worst of the flooding. A drive that should have taken 10 minutes ended up being close to an hour, and it was a very white-knuckled hour. We were greatly relieved to safely drop off our friends at their bed & breakfast for the night, then began our own trek home, which took another 30 minutes or so. I can't tell you how relieved and thankful we were when we pulled into our garage last night!

So often we take it for granted that we're going to get home safely from wherever we've been, especially when it's something as simple as having dinner at a local restaurant, but I certainly didn't take it for granted last night! When we watched our local news at 11 PM, they said that several streets had washed out. They also said that tree limbs were floating on one road - the same road we took after we dropped off our friends at their bed & breakfast. Wow!

So what does this have to do with being committed to staying on plan, you may be asking :-). Simply this: when you commit to staying on plan each and every day, you learn to find other ways to deal with stress because staying on plan eliminates the ability to do emotional eating. When I was on Take Shape for Life/Medifast 5&1 and encountered a stressful situation, I couldn't reach for one of my old "comfort foods" because none of them were on plan. Since I had committed to staying on plan, I had to find other ways to deal with that stress. For me (and I've shared this in the past), I learned to go to the True Source of true comfort, my Heavenly Father. Instead of reaching for food, I turned to Him in prayer and asked for strength or whatever I needed to deal with the situation. Doing this time after time not only strengthened my relationship with my Savior, it changed how I deal with stress, and how I deal with food.

Last night was incredibly stressful for me and I prayed much of the way between the time we left the restaurant and the time we got home. Two years ago, prior to starting on Take Shape for Life/Medifast, I certainly would have prayed on the way home, but I would have headed straight to the refrigerator when I got home to deal with much of the residual anxiety. That scenario didn't even enter my mind last night, because I no longer have the knee-jerk reaction to reach for food to deal with jumbled emotions.

So my point today is that as you are once again committing to an on-plan day, you are doing a lot more than just ensuring you reach your goal. You are also, whether you realize it or not, reprogramming your head and your heart - and this change is critical to not only help you reach your goal, but to stay there.

This morning the rain has stopped and the sun is shining - it's going to be a great, on-plan day for me! How about you?