Choosing a New Direction

As little children, many of us were encouraged to believe we could do anything we wanted to do.  Once I became a parent, I tried hard to instill in my children the belief and confidence that, with God's help, they could become whatever they wanted to be.  I read my children a fair number of Dr. Seuss books, where they not only learned that they just might like green eggs and ham, but they also learned other things like:  "You have brains in your head.  You have feet in your shoes.  You can steer yourself any direction you choose.  You're on your own.  And you know what you know.  And YOU are the one who'll decide where to go."

But what happens to us when we become adults?  We may have brains in our head and (most of the time!) we have feet in our shoes, but we often shift from believing that we can decide where to go to thinking that we're trapped where we are.  The disappointments many of us gather along the way to becoming adults, and the failures we experience as adults slowly drain away that "can do" attitude we had as children and we allow other things, people and circumstances, to decide where we'll go and who we will be.

But the reality is that we still have brains in our head and feet in our shoes and we can still steer ourselves in any direction we choose.  We just have to choose.

We may have to shake off those concepts we've accumulated over the years, and that's not always easy to do, but we are never really trapped.  We can begin to move in a different direction the moment we decide to do so.

For many or most of us here, we may have felt trapped for year inside of a body we didn't want and some of you, like me, may have felt pretty hopeless at one point.  Repeated failure as losing weight had worn me down and reinforced my concept that I couldn't do this.  Part of me just wanted to throw in the towel and stop trying because every attempt ended in failure and a deeper sense of frustration and despair. 

I'm so thankful that there was another part of me that kept trying, that refused to accept that I would live out my life in a 260+ pound body.  As health issues related to my obesity began to emerge, I finally realized that my obesity threatened to shorten my life.  That reality gave me the focus I needed to make the choices necessary to go in a new, healthy direction.

The good news is that my experience isn't unique - I've seen countless others make the fundamental decision to get healthy and then turn around years, even decades, of unhealthy habits.  The same can be true for everyone here.  You have brains in your head.  You have feet in your shoes.  You can steer yourself any direction you choose.  Choose wisely :-)