Stressed or Blessed?

A while back I received one of those infamous e-mail forwards from one of my friends.  I have to be honest and confess that I usually delete any forwards without reading them, partly because I don't have time to read everything I receive and partly because if there are multiple forwards, there's a good chance I've read it before.  However, I decided to open this one, which was an embedded PowerPoint file.  Each slide had a positive message and the music was nice, so I let it play.

One slide in particular caught my attention.  It said "Too blessed to be stressed."  That sounds pretty simplistic, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that profound thoughts are often wrapped in simple phrases.  As I thought about this phrase, I realized that it's all about our perspective and what we choose to focus on.

Each one of us has things in our lives that could stress us out if we focused on them.  The economy is difficult, our investments and 401k accounts have taken a beating over the past few years; perhaps our kids are making us crazy or we are overworked and underpaid at our jobs; the house needs cleaning, there are weeds to be pulled, the car needs a tune-up.  And oh yes - we're working to lose weight, get healthy and create new, healthy habits!

If we allow ourselves to focus on the challenges, we will live stressed-out lives.  That does NOT mean that we should just pretend that everything is wonderful and ignore the challenges - denial isn't the answer :-).  But what we can do is take a look at the bigger picture and look for the blessings that are wrapped in those challenges.  We can also look at all of the blessings in our lives - and we are all blessed people, when we stop and think about it.

Again, I don't want to minimize the situations that many of you find yourselves in today, because I know that some of you are going through very deep waters right now.  My concern is that if we become focused on the stress and not the blessings, it becomes that much more difficult to maintain the positive outlook and positive energy we need to get through the day.  If we're focused on the stress, we're less likely to take care of ourselves, and we're less likely to think it's important to take care of ourselves.  If we're focused on the stress, it's a lot easier to rationalize that we "deserve" to eat off-plan, or that it will be easier to focus on losing weight when we're not under so much pressure.

I want to encourage you today to keep on keeping on!  Look for the blessings in your life and take time to give thanks for them - it will change your perspective.

And just in case you need a gentle reminder, one of your blessings is the opportunity you have to be on Take Shape for Life/s 5&1 plan :-).  You have the privilege of being on a plan that is proven to safely and quickly get you to a healthy weight, and it's providing all of the nutrition you need as you get there.  Each day that you're on plan is another day closer to your goal - another blessing!

Choosing to count our blessings . . . just another opportunity today to choose wisely :-)