Choose You Blog

Thanks for all of your wonderful and supportive comments on last week’s post.  As promised, all of your comments were entered into a drawing for a Choose You stainless water bottle and lapel pin. Here is how it went down…

I had told my daughter (and official Choose You referee) that she could pick the winner. But when it was time to pick, my mother (and Choose You supporter) wanted to have a debate over who was more deserving of that honor. Ultimately, I let my daughter pick. Then, in order to appease my mother’s sense of competition, I had them both compete to see who could draw the better picture of the winner’s name. Only catch was, they didn’t want me to choose whose picture was better, they wanted all of you to decide (see poll at the end of this post).

And the winner is…

Congratulations Michele. You are the winner of the Choose You water bottle…I’ll be contacting you soon.

So now that we’ve taken care of business, let me tell you how I’ve been doing with my Choose You commitment.

It’s good and bad. The good…I haven’t eaten any of the foods I committed not to eat (that would be sugar and high fat snacks). The bad…I’ve been over compensating by eating more low-fat snacks (mostly pretzels). Since part of my commitment also involves losing at least five pounds, my current pretzel consumption isn’t going to be acceptable. But not to worry. I have a plan.

This is something that has worked for me in the past, so I’m going to do it again. Since I tend to be a “grazer” when it comes to eating snacks, I’m going to use small zip-lock bags to divide my snacks into smaller servings. I’ll go ahead and do it now so I can show you what I mean…and so I actually do it.

So now the bag of pretzels is filled with a bunch of smaller bags. I’m going to do the same thing with low-fat Cheez-Its. I know you can buy snacks already in smaller bags, but I always think it’s more expensive that way.

In addition to trying to be more conscientious about my snack consumption, I’m also going to start using the online calorie counter/food journal again (it really helps keep me more mindful of what I’m putting in my mouth).

And although I tend to be more of a do as I say, not as I do kind of girl…I’m going to try to take my own advice about willpower…

The more willpower you have the easier it will be, but perfection isn’t necessary.

No one wants to admit that they lack willpower or self-control, but the truth is, none of us has an unlimited supply. Some days we may have less self control than others, but that makes us normal, not imperfect.

When it comes to healthy living, a healthy dose of willpower is helpful. The good thing is, once you’ve had the willpower to resist certain unhealthy choices and adapt healthy ones, willpower is needed less and less because your new choices become habit.

If you have unhealthy habits, it is possible to change them into healthy habits. They say it takes about three weeks for something to become a habit (or to unlearn a habit), so those first three weeks are when willpower is most needed. And there are things we can do to help maintain our willpower during these critical times. Here are a few tips…

Can I do it?

I’m sure gonna try.

And, just for fun. Help me decide who did the better drawing.

What “Michele” Drawing Do You Like Better?Market Research