Choosing to Change Our Choices

After being gone last week, I'm happy to be home and also happy to be back blogging :-). We had a wonderful time at the resort in the Dominican Republic, where we soaked up a lot of sun, did a ton of walking, and just relaxed with a group of friends. Because we stayed active and were semi-mindful of what we ate, the scale was pretty gentle to us when we got home - always a welcome relief! My husband and I have both cut back for a few days and picked up some additional Medifast meals to enable us to quickly return to our pre-trip weight. I love how easy this program makes it to lose weight AND maintain our healthy weight!

The challenge we face, whether we're in the weight loss 5&1 phase of this program or well into maintenance, is being willing to make the changes required. I don't know about you, but I still fight the "want my cake and eat it, too" mindset, and I'm not talking about a Medifast "shake cake", either :-). As I've shared in the past, I still have what I call my "fat girl" taste buds - every fattening food I ever enjoyed at 268 pounds still sounds and frankly tastes as good to me as it ever did. I have to choose whether or not I'm going to make healthy choices: to have baked chicken instead of fried (even though, truth be told, I prefer fried . . . ), to skip the loaded baked potato and have steamed vegetables instead, etc. Almost two years into maintenance finds me making the healthier option the vast majority of the time because, honest to goodness, nothing - NOTHING - tastes as good as thin feels :-). That doesn't make it easy all the time, but it DOES make it worth it!

When I was on Take Shape for Life/Medifast 5&1, learning to say "no" to things that weren't on plan helped me change my mindset about food. I'm pretty strong-willed and not a particularly compliant person (honest!), so learning to be compliant on a very structured program was a big deal to me. Getting the results I wanted meant I couldn't tweak things to my liking, and it signaled the end of trying to rationalize and "outsmart" a program, something I did on every other program I'd ever done.

Getting the results we want (reaching our goal) in the time frame we want them (which I assume is "as fast as possible", right?) requires following the program. Period. That doesn't mean that if someone goes off plan, they're destined to fail, because that's not true at all. What I have observed, however, is that the individuals who DO reach goal eventually get to the point where they're ready to follow the program. They may have gone on and off plan at some point, but when they make the decision to get to their goal, the off-plan eating comes to an end. At the point a person is ready to really do it, they figure out what they need to do to make it happen. Funny thing, too - once they make that decision and go for it, they finally get there!

It always comes down to choices, doesn't it? Once we know what we want, the choices we need to make become clear. Do you know what you want today? If so, focus on that and then, of course, choose wisely :-)