Our return home from Niagara Falls was delayed by a day due to an accident we had in Ontario, so we didn't get home until yesterday afternoon. Thankfully no one was hurt and we were able to drive our car home (today's schedule includes getting body shop estimates). Other than the accident, we had a great time there, enjoyed the Falls and took a lot of pictures. We also walked - a lot!
After driving to Niagara Falls on Saturday (with stops, it took almost 8 hours to get there), we still walked about five miles once we were there. It was amazing to not only be able to easily walk that far, but also realize that I wasn't dying of exhaustion in the process. I actually felt great and could have continued to walk - there was no feeling of needing to sit down or worse, collapse. My husband and I ate Medifast meals and drank a lot of water throughout the day, then had a healthy (not lean and green) dinner at the Rainforest Cafe (a treat for our granddaughters and the two teens with us).
Surprisingly, we did a lot better than one of the teens who traveled with us. She choose to drink soda pop and picked up typical junk food snacks when we stopped (we traveled with my daughter and her family and both vehicles were stocked with healthy snack options and lots of water, which this teen opted to not have). Her dinner choice was a high-fat menu option. This teen is quite overweight and also very sedentary. She not only had problems with all of the walking we did, but after finishing her dinner, also complained of not feeling well due to stomach issues.
The contrast between living a healthy lifestyle and making different choices was striking: two grandparents, 58 and 59, had a lot more energy and were able to have a lot more fun than a 16 year old. It really saddened me to see how much she struggled and how tired she was, especially since we felt great and energized. I think she saw the difference, too. She is staying with my daughter and her husband this summer and they are working with her to develop healthier habits which she will hopefully take home with her and incorporate into her life.
Living optimally healthy isn't about being a certain age, it's about making certain, deliberate choices. I know that if I hadn't made the choice to get healthy - and the choice to stay on plan - I would not have been able to walk those five miles on Saturday, let alone walk another three miles the next day. I would have been exhausted, miserable, looking for places to stop and rest as my legs, feet and knees were not designed to support the extra 126 pounds I carried.
When I started on Take Shape for Life/Medifast a little more than three years ago, I just knew I needed to get healthy. I made the choice to stay on plan and took it one meal and one day at a time. It certainly wasn't always easy, but drawing on the Lord's strength every day, I did it. Any sacrifice I made during those 11 months, any food that I didn't eat was more than worth it to get my life and my health back. Being able to easily walk and enjoy beautiful Niagara Falls was yet another blessing that resulted from those choices. No off-plan food would have been worth not getting to my goal and missing out on the joy of this past weekend.
We usually don't experience immediate consequences for the choices we make, so it can be easy to think that the choices we make today don't really matter. But they do - and they will matter even more one, two, and three years from now, and beyond. Today I would encourage you to think about what you want your life to look like a year from now, then choose wisely :-)
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