Today I went to Whole Foods on Briarcliff and to the one on Ponce in Midtown.  I met with the Community Relations Manager at the Midtown store and discussed having a monthly meeting at their location.  She gave me her card and asked me to send her a mailnote outlining what I'd like to do.  So, I am making some headway!

Hopefully, we can setup a location for this group to meet monthly.

Is there a preference for meeting location between:

Midtown

Briarcliff

Let me know.

Mick

Hopefully everyone had a great Thanksgiving.  I'm looking forward to the upcoming holidays.  This is the time of year when neighbors, family, friends and co-workers make sweet goodies and try to steer us away from our goals.  Remember why you had WLS!  What were you goals?  Did you write them down?  Were they measurable like... get to a size __ dress size or tangible things like fit in an airplane seat without an extender, see my toes again or something similar?

Don't wait until January 1st to make a resolution to stick to a healthy lifestyle over the holiday season!  Eating a bunch of empty calories and trying to convince yourself that you can get back on track in January may work or it may not.  Some people get very frustrated when they realize how much weight they gained over a relatively short timeframe.

So my challenge to you is to write down your Wellness Goals for 2009.  Remind yourself why you had surgery, what you had hoped to achieve and hold those goals in the forefront of your thought process.  Of course, ONE little serving of dessert at Christmas dinner won't ruin all the progress you've made since surgery.  The real challenge in that thought process is sticking to one serving of dessert.  I have a very hard to regulating sweets once I start.  It's best if I just avoid them.

So far, my holiday season has been a pretty healthy one.  I am sticking to healthy meals, exercising daily and keeping myself busy so I don't focus on negative things that don't help me continue making progress on my journey.  Sometimes we have to be selfish about our health, hapiness and general well-being.  We have to remind others how important it is to reach our goals and how their efforts at "pushing food" doesn't help us reach those goals.  By reminding people, we make our goals their goals.  In a sense, we are asking them to join the fight and help us instead of just complaining about it.

So why did you have WLS?  Were you sick of the roller coaster weight associated with eating what you wanted and then dieting to lose it?  Isn't that what this post is really about?  Eating what we want over the holiday season and then dieting later?  A healthy lifestyle should include some of the foods we enjoy in moderation.  Again, the key is being able to adhere to "moderation" and being honest with outselves about the foods we can't moderate effectively and avoiding them. 

Have a happy and healthy holiday season!


Mick