Plan and Be Prepared

Happy Monday! How did your weekend go? My weekend ended up being a lot different than planned . . . what an understatement!

I picked up my two oldest granddaughters (age 7 and 5) Friday morning and brought them back to my house, with the plan that they would stay until sometime Saturday afternoon. Friday went pretty much as planned - we spent a couple of hours at our local aquatic center, which has a wonderful children's area, then went back to my house for snuggles, stories, games, and a tea party. Saturday, however, was an entirely different story. My oldest granddaughter, Amanda, woke me up a little before 7 AM crying and telling me that her tummy hurt. Before the (very long) day was over, we'd spent about 12 hours in two separate visits to the emergency room for a series of tests, all of which ended up being inconclusive. Thankfully, Amanda seemed fine yesterday and we have no idea what caused her pain and fever, other than possibly some odd virus. We didn't get home from the second ER trip until after 2 AM Sunday, so my daughter and her husband (who drove the 30 minutes to my house when Amanda got sick) ended up spending what was left of the night at our house. Their entire family, including their dog, stayed until after dinner last night, making for a very busy weekend!

Why I'm sharing all of this on my daily "choice blog" is because the last thing my daughter and I did before we left for the hospital on Saturday was grab several Medifast meals - bars, cheese puffs and pretzels, along with a few bottles of water. We had no idea what we were in for or how long we'd be there, but we both knew enough to be prepared. Neither one of us was willing to wait until we were at the hospital and hungry to figure out what we were going to do for meals. Prior to Take Shape for Life/Medifast, I would have made sure I had money on me and would have paid whatever I had to pay to get whatever I could find to eat. It wasn't much of a plan, and since I was 260 pounds, it obviously wasn't a very good plan!

Planning ahead, and planning for the unexpected, is so important for us both when we're on the weight loss portion of this program and also when we're in maintenance. Waiting to catch something somewhere almost always means that we'll pay too much money for marginal-at-best food. My daughter and I checked out the vending machine at the hospital, curious to see what our options would have been without our Medifast meals. It was a pretty sad selection, high priced and most of the food choices fell into the high calorie/high fat processed food category. Needless to say, we were happy that we saved a lot of money and got much better nutrition with the Medifast products we had with us.

I never leave the house without at least a couple of Medifast meals with me, and I usually have a bag of chili nacho cheese puffs in my car as an additional back up. It's not that I'm obsessive about eating (at least I hope I'm not!), but I don't want to be caught unprepared. Life happens, and sometimes it happens when we're least expecting it. When the unexpected comes, it saves not only money and calories but also stress to know that what to eat isn't one of the things I have to worry about.

Have a great Monday! Plan ahead, and choose wisely :-)