motd Sat Jan 30, 2010

[Guest guest]

THE CAROUSEL

Saturday, 30 January 2010

I just love carousels. When I was a little kid, my parents bought me a toy carousel that tuned round and round after you wound it up. Oh, I could just sit there and stare at it for hours on end. My little carousel also played music as it turned and I'd be in seventh heaven watching it.

When I was about five years old, my parents took me to City Park in New Orleans beautiful Garden District to see my first real carousel. And I remember...it was magnificent! My father put me on one of the horses and, right away...I loved it! Round and round...up and down!

Which gets me to thinking...life can be like a carousel, can't it? I mean, it can be a carousel of weight loss...and weight gain. (Up and down...up and down!) You get on the scale one morning and...you're down. But five days later, you get on the same scale and...you're up. And it's so hard to be on this carousel's "horse" going...nowhere!

What can really knock you off your "carousel horse" of eating healthy and exercising regularly are the weekends. Oh, you do just fine Monday through Friday. But by the time Saturday rolls around...you blow it. And hey, sometimes you blow it big time!See, a lot of people feel that after five days of faithfully staying on program, they can take a little, uh..."vacation" from their new healthier lifestyles. Some of them have put in a lot of hard hours at work and think of their weekend eating as their "reward." (Uh, oh!) And then some people just go crazy-nuts when they go into a restaurant or have food delivered to their homes over the weekend.I was watching a pizza commercial the other day. In it, the announcer boasted that this pizza chain can put six kinds of cheese and five varieties of meat on one pizza. Six cheeses?! (And we wonder why pizza is so fattening!)

Look, if you've been on program Monday through Friday then, hooray! You should be proud of yourself. But that pride should actually fuel you to continue doing great all the way through the weekend, too.And what are the weekend foods most people eat? Oh, there are so many! For instance, there's Mexican food. The danger here is that those south of the border dishes may contain as much cheese as the announcer in that pizza commercial bragged about. (LOL!) Then there's the Chinese food where so many items on the menu are fried. And let's not let the Italian restaurants off the hook with their giant homemade meatballs made from an old family recipe. Down south, barbecue is king with their pulled pork and barbecued ribs. Finally, there's my personal favorite...the cafeterias. Oh, you can just about pitch a tent in one of those Hometown Buffets and never leave, right?

But here's the thing...all of those restaurants also have salads on their menus. And most of them can grill you a chicken breast and steam some vegetables for you.

You know how you feel when you're at a restaurant and end up eating enough for two, don't you? Once you get home, you not only feel bloated but you feel guilty, too! But when you stay on program when eating out or after having food delivered, you don't end up with that stuffed and guilty feeling. Instead, you feel proud that you were able to stay on program while being satisfied with a sensible meal. Now...that's the feeling you want, isn't it?!If you stay on program today and tomorrow, when you get on the scale Monday morning, oh how happy you'll be to see the results of your staying in control of your eating this weekend! Oh yeah...what a feeling!Hey, if you go out for dinner tonight, I want you to think of me sitting there right next to you as you make your selections from that menu! And as you order, remember, you don't want to feel that little horse on your carousel going...UP on Monday morning!Love,