Thank You So Much For The Advice.......

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

I want to thank those of you who took the time to share their thoughts, ideas and most importantly their experiences on removing sugar from their diet. I really appreciate all the insights, and the resources. I have already started reading and crafting a plan.

To be honest with you the hardest part is going to be the Coke Zero. I started counting in my head how many I have per day and when I drink them and I was amazed in a scary sort of way. I didnt know I drank THAT MUCH diet soda. Whats worse is that I always buy one right when I finish a work out. I havent always drank diet soda. I used to drink plain old unsweet tea and I got lazy because the diet soda was readily availible and I didnt have to do anything more that twist a cap.

I can do this but I'm no different than anyone else. Change sucks and its scary. I know, though, that I have many people who care and who will support me.

Thank you guys for the love and all the input

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I Need A Bit of Advice on Sugar

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

I would like to remove processed sugar from my diet and I'm not quite sure how to go about doing it. I have read some things that speak in a scientific sort of language I have a hard time grasping. Does anyone have a resource or experience that has a simple approach to removing sugar from my diet? I'm not sure if I should go cold turkey, cut back, reduce it or how to approach it. Is if simply a matter of only eating fruit and removing cookies cakes and pies?

This is a problem in my life and a barrier to continuing my health journey.

Any help would be greatly appreciated

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Accepting The Challenge

Monday, May 09, 2011

The last couple of weeks have not been my best. With my basement flooding three times and finding out that flood insurance is only good if you have to commute to and from your house by boat, my moods took a marked turn south. Things just seemed to get worse and worse. When I am stressed it has a tendency to settle in my lower back which makes me walk as if I was thirty years older than I really am. It’s not only painful but it’s downright nerve wracking. It hasn’t done much for my disposition either.

On my walk this morning I told myself feeling like this, all stressed and uptight, was getting really old. That’s when it dawned on me that it all begins and ends in my mind. As long as I look at the world through soot colored glasses than I am going to attract all sorts of negative people and experiences to me. It’s like expanding the adage of “You are who you hang around with,” to “You are what you think you are.” It begins and ends in my mind. I asked myself to take a good look at me and see what I saw. (Say that ten times really fast!) What do I want to see? I ticked off a litany of things that most of the time I file under the category of “hopes and dreams.” I saw things that would be nice.

“If ya can’t see it John, how can ya feel it?” I said to myself. Really good point. I saw where I was at in many aspects of my life and I realized it I was exactly how I saw myself. It’s sort of like, “Well what did you expect?” As I walked I started taking pieces of who I am and projecting what I wanted them to look like. Pretty soon I began to feel lighter, more peaceful and while that nagging pain in back didn’t go away but it subsided. I saw a ray of hope.

As I bounced along, it struck me there was more. Once I had the image in my mind and felt how powerful it was I had to become it. Not when I reach my goal weight, run a 10K or cycle a century. I had to become that vision right now, oversized belly, sore back and all. I had to realize as the adage says, “The reason for all challenges is so that you can finally learn that none are larger than you.” I have to learn that when I believe I am healthy and whole I will be. When I believe my life is full of joy and blessings and amazingly wonderful people, it will be.

A long time ago an English teacher of mine often said “If it’s going to be, it’s up to me.”

When I see it I can believe it and when I believe it I can become it. Everything I do has to be in the present tense. Just ask any very happy person. I am not suggesting we hire the cast of a Broadway musical and go dancing down the streets of life under some false illusion. Life throws us curve balls. How we deal with them is determined by what we think, feel and believe.

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Following The Light Towards My Happiness

Friday, May 06, 2011

Happiness is not elusive. It’s pretty straight forward. I think I’m the one who has had issues with happiness, not the other way around. I’ve had a hard time defining it. It’s as if I’d walked into a store and asked for a piece of clothing that I could not define and then expected the clerk to rush to a rack and return to me with it, smiling all the while. I know I’ve wanted to be happy because everyone does. You listen to interviews of famous people and they gush from the other side of the coffee table, “I’m finally happy.” Sometimes, I think there is an expectation that it’s to be delivered wrapped in a bow.

Happiness is very hard work. Don’t let anyone fool you. You have to define it and you have to decide what you are willing to do in order to attain it. You have to prepare to suffer a bit as your perception of your world and everyone in it changes, for the better I might add. Happiness isn’t like a train schedule. It doesn’t have planned stops along the way so you and I can wait for it, hand over our eyes peering off into the wilderness and then signaling the brass band to start playing. It surprises you, like the oft forgotten cousin who shows up at your door step for an extended visit. You love them half to death; you just weren’t ready for them.

Real happiness comes on its own terms, not mine. I cannot create conditions for it, define its parameters or hand it a list of exclusions. Like the ground water in my basement this past week it finds its own level and then challenges us to live there. It’s a long journey. It’s why so few of us reach it.

Most of us give up. We tell ourselves the battles not really worth all the effort. We tell ourselves we should be satisfied with what we have and there are people much worse off than we are………….. Yada, yada, yada. We turn our failures into excuses to sit quietly in the corner rather than as energy and focus to move forward and try once again. It’s all really the antithesis of happiness, isn’t it?

I write this rambling preamble this morning because as I lie in bed reviewing what needed to be done today and in what order it needed to be completed in happiness snuck up behind me and grinned. I go through a bit of a ritual where I am grateful and thankful that both feet hit the ground again this morning. It was at that point it dawned on me that I am the happiest person I know. It has nothing to do with status, wealth or where I live. It has to do with how I feel. I expect to be happier because I’m not yet the happiest person in the world. I don’t think that person exists as happiness is very subjective.

I am happy because of four things. I hang around with excellent people and have made the tough choices to let people go in my life who weren’t the best influences. I have come to believe I am really worth the effort I put into myself and I deserve this new found happiness. Finally, I am what I believe I am.

Honestly, as I reviewed my blog this morning I’m not sure why I wrote it. Oh, I am lol. Someone out there needed to read this. A long time ago, in the throes of my despair, unhappiness and living with the feeling that I was all alone, my Creator, reached down and light a lamp that showed me a path towards this happy life I now live. Writing this blog will never, ever repay that, but it’s a start. As the kindness and love was extended to me, so now I extend it to you.

Happiness isn’t about goal s and objectives, it’s about the challenge of allowing your heart to grow.

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Go Your Own Way

Thursday, May 05, 2011

I once told my children that if you didn’t get out of bed until eight am the day was already half over. Joan would look at them through the steam of her coffee and let them know that while they should always respect their father, what I just said was a matter of opinion. I am out of bed and ready to go no later than six am. I have a to-do list and I am at my most effective for the remainder of the day when I can accomplish things early on. It gives me confidence. It makes me focused and I have a clear vision of my purpose. I track my food much better and I am more apt to exercise. Before I go to bed each evening I pretty much know the first five things I need to do when I get up in the morning. When I live this way, no one can stop me. I, you see, have a plan.

Joan, on the other hand, gets out of bed when she is done sleeping. Her first order of business is coffee followed by Matt Lauer. If she doesn’t have to work in the morning she and Matt have multiple cups of coffee followed by the newspaper. A shower comes, when it comes, unless she has to work. We have a kitchen table that seats eight. The kids are grown and gone but it still seats eight. Joan and I eat on about a quarter of the table. The rest if it is piled with her “stuff.” The only time she has ever threatened to leave me is if I mess with her “stuff.”

We have two totally separate ways of approaching life and we both are very successful people. We have different ways of communicating and we are both extremely effective in getting our message across. There isn’t anything either one of us wont tackle, we choose to wrap our arms around it a different way.

There is not only one way to do things. I could probably have put that a bit more eloquently but the simpler the better. There is no one way to lose weight and maintain a healthy life style. I am a flexetarian. Joan has never met a piece of beef she doesn’t like. I exercise daily, she exercises three or four times a week. We are fortunate that we have learned two things over thirty seven years of marriage. The first is to respect each other’s views and choices and the second is not to get taken in by every fad and idea that comes around the corner.

It took me awhile to realize those things. I would always look at other people and how they did things and measure myself against their achievements. I always came up lacking. That was their life style it wasn’t mine. The first thing I did was totally embrace John, warts and all. I realized that I wasn’t hurting anyone getting out of bed at five am to start my day. I get seven hours sleep and I do fine with it.

Go your own way. Find the things that truly convince you that this journey is worth all the effort and above and beyond everything else ---------------- be the extremely unique you that you were created to be.
That is why I love you so very much. Now------------------ Go celebrate who you are.

Shoot, the day’s half over. I gotta go.

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