Still Making Choices

How on earth can we be at the end of July?  I'm ending this month on a happy note as I'm crossing one more thing off of my "bucket list."  We're going to Niagara Falls today (returning tomorrow).  It's only a six hour drive from our home, so I'm not sure what took us so long to do this, but today is the day!  My younger daughter and her family are also going, along with our niece and one of her friends, plus my son-in-law's sister (we're taking two vehicles).  Once again, we'll bring enough Medifast food so that we can keep going all day long, saving both time AND money :-). 

I remember when I first started on this program and initially thought that I'd just use it for a month or so to "jump start" my weight loss and then switch back to the program I'd been trying to follow before (operative word is "trying").  Of course, once I realized how easy this program was and marveled at how good I felt, as well as experienced encouraging weight loss, I abandoned thoughts of going back to the other plan.  One thing I did determine pretty early on was that I wanted to get off of the packaged food as soon as possible once I reached my goal.  I viewed these products as a means to end, and I very much looked forward to the end of not only my weight loss journey but also the end to the foods.

So what happened?  First of all, my taste buds changed and I found that I actually LIKED the food (who would have thought it possible?).  Second, I liked the convenience of the Medifast products, and with the introduction of the crunch bars 18 months ago and the pretzels and cheese puffs a year ago, the convenience factor has gone up incredibly.  (When I was on 5&;1, we only had the bars that are now renamed "maintenance bars," and we were limited to one per day.  On-the-go days meant preparing oatmeal muffins and cookies or soup bread and soup chips so that I'd have portable food throughout the day.)  I also embraced the principle of eating six small meals a day, and I'm frankly not interested in planning, shopping and preparing six mini meals a day.  Having 2-3 Medifast meals a day enables me to continue to eat small meals throughout the day with a minimal amount of effort. 

When I'm home all day, I tend to eat less Medifast meals because it's easy to have Greek yogurt and fruit or other nutritious small meals.  But on my busy days, and always when we travel (which is quite a bit), I pretty much eat Medifast meals all day, then enjoy a healthy (but not necessarily lean and green) meal at night. 

My food plan in Maintenance might not work for everyone, but it's been over two years and counting, so it's working for me!  I still have a fully-developed set of fat-girl tastebuds that think food can only be improved by frying :-), so I have to choose every day to either continue my pursuit of optimal health or not.  It's not always easy, and I certainly don't always make the best choices.  But I do keep what I want - a long, optimally healthy life - in focus, and knowing what I want makes the choices easier.

Day in and day out, whether you're new to this program or a veteran in maintenance, we all have choices to make.  Choose wisely :-)