a new day, a new lady

A fresh new month! Well I am happy to announce I am in a MUCH better mood than yesterday. Thanks to the positive words yesterday and helping to keep me focused on the great things that the week HAD brought!

So a few posts ago, I mentioned that I had a few things I wanted to write about - well, I am just now getting to that, lol. Better late than never though.

First of all, I wanted to mention that I made Roni’s Simple Savory Stuffed Sweet Potatoes. This is the 4th meal or recipe I have cooked from her and again, it was delicious!! I snapped a picture with my camera phone that I sent to my mom, and then I realized yesterday that I could ago ahead and use it here too. It’s not nearly as pretty as Roni’s but I bet it was every bit as delicious! lol

So if you have yet to make anything of Roni’s GreenLiteBites website then you are SERIOUSLY missing out!! Get on that ASAP! I’m seriously contemplating making her 100% Whole Grain Pancakes tomorrow morning. If I do, I’ll be sure to share that experience with you as well!

Secondly, last week - my last weigh in and meeting we talked about Dealing with Antomatic Negative Thoughts - ANTs. Well this past Wednesday at the meeting, we discussed the last 5 in the series of 10 steps and I wanted to go ahead and share those with everyone.

• Visualize and affirm your goals and objectives
• Take action
• Respond to feedback
• Persevere
• Celebrate your success

So here is what I took out of those last 5 steps…

• Visualizing and affirming your goals and objectives is JUST like WW’s Tool for Living of Mental Rehearsing. Visualizing difficult situations and what we will do in them to succeed. Seeing ourself at that goal weight. Imagining how good it will feel. 
• Taking action - I did this when I packed healthy snacks to take with me to the emergency room so I wouldn’t be tempted to go to the vending machine. Or as one lady in my meeting said, she was going on vacation and she had brought all kinds of healthy snacks for the plan ride and already located the nearest grocery store to where she was staying so she could go shopping and stay on plan. Or if you are going out to eat at a restaurant, looking at their menu online before hand to have an idea of what to order, the nutritional information, etc.
• Responding to feedback - the scale serves as feedback and really it’s ALL positive feedback, it’s just how we choose to interpret that feedback. Yes, no one likes to see a gain on the scale (especially when it’s not related to gaining muscle), but the scale is letting us know that we aren’t doing something right so we need to re-evaluate what we are doing (respond). Of course there are several other types of feedback as well. What are some other examples of feedback you can think of?
• Persevering - going THROUGH the ANT’s and not letting them bring us down or stunt our success. If it’s raining, well grab an umbrella and still going for that walk. If we want some cookies, planning for those cookies and ONLY eating the amount we planned on - all examples of persevering!
• Finally celebrating our success - this is SO important! We need to appreciate our ROLE in and RESPONSIBILITY for our success. Once we acknowledge ourself in the equation, we value ourselves more. And once we celebrate those successes and APPRECIATE them, we will think much harder about UNdoing those successes.

I love WW meetings! I mean they really just help to put everything in perspective and put you in a good mood and help you to find the strengths in yourself and provide an outline for how to go about this journey. So I know I proposed the same idea last time and I’m not sure if anyone did, but I’m going to challenge everyone to write out their own list, of 10 things now, and how these steps apply to them. You don’t need to share them with me if you don’t want to but I promise it will help YOU in YOUR journey, just having this outline. Good luck!

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and stays OP, gets their activity in and don’t let any ANTs get in your way!