Having It All

I had the opportunity a few days ago to watch a vintage TV commercial from the late 1970's or early 1980's.  The ad was for a cologne and it featured a woman who proudly proclaimed she could bring home the bacon, cook it up in a pan, and never let her husband forget that he was a man - singing all of this as she skillfully (and cheerfully) moved from a corporate look to wearing an apron to wearing something sexy to remind her husband . . . oh, never mind!  :-)  The implication was that a woman really could have it all, at least if she wore the right cologne.

A couple of decades later and I think most of us have figured out that we really can't have it all, at least not at the same time.  Some of us have spent a lot of time and driven ourselves and our families half-crazy trying to have it all - all at the same time - and ended up tired, frustrated and disappointed in the process.  We then conclude that we must be doing something wrong because we're sure that if we just did things right, we could somehow pull it off.

The reality is that when we choose one thing, by implication we are also NOT choosing something else.  That's true in life and it is most certainly true when it comes to our weight and our health.  Unless we are blessed with a killer metabolism (and the fact that you're reading this means you probably don't have one!), we have to choose between eating everything we want, when we want it and in the quantity we want, and getting to and maintaining a healthy weight.  This time of year we may want to eat everything at the holiday parties and throw caution to the wind, but we can't do that AND keep moving toward a healthy weight at the same time.

It's not always fun living with the reality of having to choose.  I want to eat all of my favorite holiday goodies, but I know I can't do that and continue to zip my size 6's . . . there's nothing like white sugar and white flour mixed with lots of butter to pile pounds on me pretty quickly!  I think part of that is due to the fact that I just don't metabolize that stuff very well and I think the other part is that once I start eating that kind of thing, my brain disengages and portion control tends to go out the window.

I have a whole collection of great holiday recipes - cookies, breads, etc. that I haven't baked since December of 2006.  I was on 5&1 in December of 2007 and have been in maintenance since then.  I was looking through the recipes a few days ago and really had some conflicting emotions.  On the one hand, I remembered many of these recipes with a lot of fondness - they are great recipes and I enjoyed making them and eating them.  On the other hand, there was a bit of sadness because I'm not sure that I'll ever make some of them again.  We generally have a couple of desserts on Christmas day, so there isn't any need for me to bake up a storm and serve a lot of extra things.  My entire family eats a lot healthier now and we're much more careful about what we eat; if I baked a lot of extra things, they would either end up getting thrown away or worse, I'd end up eating them.

As much as I enjoyed baking and eating all of those things, I hated weighing 260+ pounds and being diabetic.  I loved baking and eating whatever I wanted whenever I wanted, but I hated how I looked and felt.  So I have to choose what I want because I can't have both the food and my health.

Ultimately we will choose what is most important to us.  Our challenge is to not lose sight of what we really want.  This time of year it's easy to forget and succumb to immediate gratification, so take a minute to remind yourself of what you really want, then choose wisely :-)