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You Never Know What Will Happen …

I’ve blogged about this before. I frequently donate blood products through my local Red Cross. Usually I give platelets, but sometimes they need plasma and sometimes whole blood. I’m not fussy. Whatever I can give that is most in need is what I will give.

For those of you who have never donated platelets or plasma, you lay in a recliner. They insert one or two needles (usually two) and they draw out the blood. It runs from one arm, through a machine which separates out the products that is being collected and then returns the remaining blood back to the other arm.

This can take a couple hours. I grab a DVD and a portable player and watch a movie. And I relax for a couple hours. But last Friday, as I was just getting ready to watch “Swordfish” (a good John Travolta movie) I noticed a lot of people walking around the facility. A lot of talking. But I was trying to focus on the movie so I tried to ignore it. Suddenly, I felt a hand rest on the back of my recliner and heard a voice above me say,”How are you today?”

I looked up, and after a brief pause, managed to say, “Fine, Mr. Woodson. But more important, how are YOU?”

Yup. Charles Woodson. #21, Pro-Bowl defensive back for the Green Bay Packers was standing over me. He had just delivered a cash donation to the Red Cross for the Sandy relief efforts. He went around to everyone donating and chatted a bit. We all got pictures.

I’m not sure why I have that goofy grin.

Oh, and he answered my question by saying that he is getting better, and expects to be back on the field in a few weeks. Being a nurse, I of course needed to give some advise: “Work with your trainers, but rest your arm when possible. Get healthy, and be 100% when you get back!”

Moral of the story? There is no moral. But please, if you are physically able, make an appointment and give some blood. Even when there are no hurricanes and superstorms, there are always people in your hometown that need blood. And someday, unfortunately, it may be you or a loved one. Help out someone now!

The “Ps” of Long Term Success, Part 6

You’ve PASSIONATE about your goal, are well-PLANNED and PREPARED. You ‘ve PROCEEDED and have demonstrated PERSISTENCE.

5.  PAY ATTENTION!

Sounds pretty basic, right? But it’s easy to forget, especially when a bit of success finally arrives. When you first start your life changing journey, you are excited. Motivated. Enthusiastic. Full of confidence.

And you start losing weight! Cool, right? So you keep on working. You keep logging. You get up early to walk, or lift, or do your preferred activity. And the weight drops a bit more.

You try a new recipe that you found on Twitter. You consciously (and politely) refuse that sweet roll at the office. The next day, you notice that your belt is a little loose. Sweet! A non-scale victory!

About the fourth or fifth week, the scale starts to show smaller weekly losses. But that’s okay, you know that everything is still working. Then one day you eat that sweet roll at the office. No worries, you know that you will run an extra mile when you get home. But when you get home, you find that the dog has gotten into the garbage, and by the time you get everything cleaned up, you decide to scrap the evening’s run and just get up a bit earlier tomorrow morning.

When you arise in the morning, it is a little cool and you decide to stay under the covers a little too long. When you eventually get up, you feel a bit guilty about eating yesterday’s donut and not running. You decide to not get on the scale because you don’t want to see a gain.

After work that night you decide to stop at your favorite Chinese place for a take-out of General Tso’s chicken. It’s really good and you eat most of it. (Okay, you really eat it all.) When you wake up, you notice your wedding ring is tight. You know that it was last night’s meal, full of sodium. No matter, it’s just a little water weight. However you don’t get on the scale, because even though it is only water weight, you don’t want to be demoralized by the gain.

That is the pattern that is very common. Early success leads to careless behaviors, and the problem is then compounded by lack of monitoring. You weren’t paying attention!

You aren’t alone. It is common. But it is correctable. You need to PAY ATTENTION. Contrary to what many people say, I believe daily weights are important. While I know that our bodies like to play little games on us (weight gains after a particularly good day of eating, losses after a binge) if you check your weight every day, at the same time each day, wearing the same clothes (or none), over the long term the scale will show you your valid trend. And seeing those small increases will help you keep a closer eye on what you eat. That small gain might give you the motivation to run when you say you are going to run and to decline that sweet roll at the office. And the losses you see will reward and reinforce your good behaviors.

But that only happens when you pay attention. Everyday.

By the way: Paying attention also applies to cooking. I recently made some chicken enchiladas under the broiler. I put then in the oven and got busy doing stuff around the house. They should have come out at 8 minutes. At 12 minutes, I smelled something burning.

FYI: topping burned enchiladas with cheese does not make them look–or taste–any better.
Paying attention to everything in your life takes time. But it is always worth it.

The “Ps” of Long Term Success, Part 5

You’ve developed PASSION, made a PLAN and are PREPARED. You took the next step and PROCEEDED toward your goal.  Now what?

5.  PERSISTENCE

Don’t quit!

Really. It’s that simple. The only way you can success is to keep at it. The only way you will certainly fail is to quit.

An old Chinese proverb reads: “Failure is not falling down, but rather in not getting up again.”

You WILL have days that do not go according to you plan. You will have days when you overeat. Or don’t exercise. Or indulge in a high-sodium meal.  So what? It’s only a problem if you let those challenges stop you. Keep returning to your PLAN. Let your PASSION keep you fired up. Never surrender.

Goals worth working toward will not usually happen overnight. Weight loss is not fast–regardless of what “The Biggest Loser” or Dr. Oz may suggest. There are no shortcuts to success. It takes determination, self-motivation and the internal strength to say:

“I’m in it, to win it! I will not quit just because it is difficult. I will not give control of my body to food. I am in control of what I eat and how I exercise.”

It’s not easy to make that mental change. And without a mental change, a physical change is nearly impossible

You’ve started on your journey. Don’t stop!

Free Greek Yogurt?

Just mentioning a cool giveaway on Danica’s Daily blog.  Want to win a case of #WeightWatchers 2 #pointsplus @Yoplait Greek 100 Yogurt? Enter this #Giveaway hosted by @danicasdaily http://goo.gl/YRqRh

Personal note:  Greek yogurt is excellent.  If one of my readers can get some free, that is even better!  One of my favorite snacks is some black cherry Greek yogurt with an ounce of dark chocolate chopped and an ounce of chopped walnuts added. And of course, some whipped topping is a must!

Low cal?  Not really.  Incredibly tasty and satisfying?  Oh, yeah!

The “Ps” of Long Term Success, Part 4

You’ve got PASSION. You made your PLAN.  And you are physically PREPARED. The next step?

4.  PROCEED

Pick up your posterior and proceed toward your goal. In other words: Get going!

This logo and its associated tag line says it best.
Your goal won’t come to you. It won’t be any easier if you wait to start tomorrow, or next Monday, or the sixth Tuesday of next month. If you wait until “The time is right”, I can predict two things:
  1. when you finally begin your weight loss journey, you will weigh more than you do now, and
  2. you probably won’t start at all.

Procrastinating a difficult challenge is common. The reality is, successfully changing your life will be one of the greatest challenges you will ever face. And it can be scary! What will people say as you make progress? What will people say if you don’t make progress?

It’s a lot easier to stay where you are. But is that what you really want? (That question is answered by your level of PASSION for your goal.)

“If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad. then Muhammad must go to the mountain.” Healthy weight loss will not happen spontaneously, just as smoking cessation will not simply just “happen”. You need to take specific steps to achieve your goals.

This step is pretty simple. Get started. That’s all. Nothing can happen until you begin.

What are YOU waiting for?

Keep coming back for more “Ps” of success. (There will be 3 or 4 more!) And, don’t worry, I will continue to post more recipes here.

The “Ps” of Long Term Success, Part 3

The continuing thoughts on how to achieve long term success.
3.  PREPARATION
So far, you have or are developing a PASSION for your goal and you have mapped out a PLAN to achieve the goal. But isn’t planning the same as preparing? They are related but not the same.  From Dictionary.com (highlights are my own):  
Plan: a scheme or method of acting, doing, proceeding, making, etc. developed in advance:
Prepare: to put in proper condition or readiness 
To go back to yesterday’s comparison to our trip to the East coast, the plan was the mapped route, and the various stops along the way. The preparation is everything we did to be ready. Some of the basic preparations were making reservations at the bed and breakfasts and hotels in each city as well as the reservations to go fishing and whale watching. We packed our suitcases with clothing and other necessities. We packed food in a cooler, to maximize our driving efficiency and save some cost.
We also made sure that the summer classes we were teaching would be completed by our departure date. We made sure that our eldest son knew all the day to day activities needed to care for Ozzy and the garden.  We took many steps in preparation for a successful execution of our plan. And it was successful!
 What steps are necessary to be prepared for long term success, especially in weight loss? After you have your plan (primary and intermediate goals) and the specific route (calorie counting, Weight Watchers, Slim-Fast, etc), you need to prepare for success.
Do you have cookbooks?  I use many different cookbooks, but the most commonly used are my Cooking Light–Fresh Food Fast and  Cooking Light Comfort Foods. I also have a subscription to the magazines Eating Well and Food Network Magazine. However, you do not need a lot of cookbooks. Many online sources including www.AllRecipes.com and www.epicurious.com (and many, many more) are excellent places to look.
Do you have time to cook and maybe even add exercise? That can be the killer. I have been asked how I am able to work full time (and my wife work full time), blog, walk, lose weight, and still cook five or six nights a week? My answer, not surprisingly is, “Preparation.” My wife and I are busy but we both want to eat healthy and stay at a healthy weight. I cook good meals and we eat them together when our schedule allows. After dinner, one of us will clean up the dishes and the other will assemble the lunches for the next day. And since we both try to be on the road well before 7am, we get our school clothes ready at night.
In fact (and I am incredibly lucky) Sunday afternoon, Tammy will organize an entire week’s dress clothes for class. She wants me to look good and my ability to put colors together is, well, let’s just say “challenged.” So she organizes them for me. Like this:
That week I only had four days of class. Two pairs of pants, each paired with two different shirts. She also gives me options for my ties, usually two or three per shirt. (I can figure out which shoes and socks to wear all by myself!) 
She will do the same for her clothes, too. Working ahead of time saves even more time every morning, and makes for a more efficient day.
We put together our menu at least a week in advance. When we plan our meals, we consider the entire family’s schedule so we know who will be home and eating on any given day. We shop together every Saturday, using a preprinted shopping lists to keep us on track and on budget. Sunday afternoon, while Tammy is organizing our clothes, I am preparing food for the week. I like to cook one or two dishes that are able to keep well in the fridge (soup, stew, pasta dishes.) If I have recipes that call for a lot of prepped foods (especially chopped veggies) I will prep everything, package and label it for the day I make the recipe. Sometimes I will make a meal with extra portions. That will either provide lunches or dinners as leftovers (useful on a day when we are especially busy) or I will pack them tightly, label them and freeze them for future days. Sometimes things come up and we don’t have time to make a whole meal, but when we have our own home-made frozen dinners, we can eat just as fast, and far healthier, and much less expensive, than eating in a restaurant. 
Our preparation has become our routine. We no longer need to really think about these preparations. They are part of our normal daily lives. And that has made our successes more likely. Not any easier, because our journeys are anything but easy, but having a routine that includes preparation allows us to focus on the truly important activities that bring greater success.

Fall Bounty

I love autumn! It truly is my favorite time of year. The air gets crisp and fresh. The leaves turn colors and then fall to the ground. The aroma of the fallen leaves immediately brings me back to my childhood when I would walk in the woods with my father, trying in vain to hunt rabbit and grouse.

I love the sight and sound of huge formations of geese flying overhead as they migrate from Canada to points far south. And the autumn season also brings a bounty of food harvest and associated feasts.

In the USA and Canada, Thanksgiving is celebrated, but at slightly different times. (It’s the first Monday in October for Canadians, and the third Thursday on November in the USA.) But both as a celebration of the season’s harvest. And I LOVE the Thanksgiving Feast. It is my favorite holiday meal of the year.

But let’s talk about one specific part of that feast.

The wonderful cranberry.

Without going into all the good health properties of the cranberry, they taste great! They are very tart and acidic, and that tartness is why they blend so well with the rich and fatty foods on the Thanksgiving table. The acid buts the heaviness of the gravies, sauces and stuffings. However, I grew up with cranberries that slid out of a can and were then cut into circles of red gel.

 Traditional in my family.

But If you want the real taste of cranberries with all their health benefits in addition to texture and great flavor, here is an exceedingly simple recipe. You can have it made in a matter of minutes. It can be served immediately, or kept in the refrigerator in a covered container. You can vary the ingredients to your taste and preferred level of sweetness.

Cranberry Relish
Serves 8

1 bag of raw cranberries, washed. (I think the bags are generally one pound)
2 medium apples, cut into quarters with the cores removed
1 orange, peeled
1/2 – 1 cup sugar (or Splenda)

Put the first three ingredients into a food processor. Process until evenly chunky. Add sweetener to taste.

Nutritional data (approximately 1/4 cup per serving):
Note: I used Splenda. If you use sugar, the calories and carbs will be accordingly higher.

Calories:    44
Fat:          0.1g
Sat fat:        0g
Chol:          0mg
Sodium:   1.1mg
Carbs:    11.6g
Fiber:          3g
Protein:     0.4g

An alternative to this recipe that I really like is to add one jalapeno.  Tart and hot!

The “Ps” of Long Term Success, Part 2

Continuing my series on how to achieve long term success.

2.  Plan

So, you have passion for your goal. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe your goal is something you would like, but don’t know if you can commit to it forever. In either case the next step is to make a plan.

What is your priority goal?
What are your intermediate goals?
What will be your path to reach your goals?

But you say, “I know what my goal is. I want to lose weight.  Isn’t that enough?”

Not really. Think about the last time you went on vacation. Did you just pile into the car (train, bus or plane) and VOILA you were at your destination? Oh, I know people can do that. My wife and I did that once, early in our marriage. But that was just for a weekend, and we did not go far away.

No, most vacations require planning. When Tammy and I drove east earlier this year, we spent days planning potential places to stop. We knew we wanted to include Boston and Portland, Maine. Those were our priority goals. But that was the easy part. And your main goal in weight is also the easy part to plan. You pick a number and say, “I want to lose X pounds.”

But we Googled a lot of different routes and other destinations en route, all through Ohio, New York, and Canada. We wanted to see what we could do on our way through the vacation. We hit our two primary goals first (four days in Boston and then two days in Portland.) Upon leaving Portland, we then planned out three intermediate stops while on our drive home to Green Bay.  And at those three destinations, we had fun, explored new regions (and drank a LOT of wine.) We had fun at our intermediate goals. This applies to your weight loss plan, especially if you have a large number as your primary goal. You should set intermediate goal while always working towards your final destination. And then, success you reach each of those steps to success, you should celebrate! Have fun while making progress!

Finally, we had a set path to our destinations. We not only printed out Google Maps directions, we also bought a GPS unit. That was our predetermined map to success. Did we stay on track? No, not completely. There were a few times when we deviated from the plan by taking a detour that was not planned due to road construction. But even though we were not following our exact plan, we were still driving towards our intended destinations.

You need to make a route to your weight-loss goal, but in this case, “a route” is all about what you will do. Will you eat low carb? Will you eat no wheat? Will you do a program that provides you prepared meals? Will you join Weight Watchers? Will you simply count calories? Will you join a gym, or run, or do P90X, or yoga? Those are all aspects of your route to success.

And like our vacation, you will also have detours. Maybe you will get ill. Maybe you will have surgery. Maybe the Thanksgiving-Christmas-New Years trifecta of parties will result in a weight gain. Those are all temporary disruptions to your short term plan, but they will not–should not–cause you to stop your journey. (If we stopped our journey due to a detour, we’d still be in Ohio, continuing to drink wine!)

You need to find your PASSION (what do you really need?) and then sit down and carefully make a PLAN (how will you get want you really need?)

Come back tomorrow for step three!

The “Ps” of Long Term Success, part 1

This is going to be a series of posts about how to find success, primarily in weight loss, but I believe that these ideas will be universal in application. These tips really do apply to everyone (it’s just that not everyone will apply them.)

1.  PASSION

No, not that passion. I mean, what do you really want? What is most important to you? What is all-consuming in your life? What do you most enjoy?

It is very hard to complete a project if your heart is not into it. Think about an assignment in school or a project at work that you’ve had. Maybe it was in a class you didn’t like, or the project was something that you believed to be useless.

Oh, I’m sure you submitted the assignment or completed the project. We always try to finish what is required of us. But what was your end result? Were the results satisfying to you, to your teacher or manager? Were you proud of your accomplishment?

The chances are that while you finished the work, you either did the bare minimum or cut corners to save time and get the “stupid thing” off your “to-do” list.

How does this apply towards weight management? Isn’t everyone obviously passionate about losing weight? Sure, most people really want to lose weight. But most people do not have the inner drive, the absolute hunger (well, generally we all experience hunger!) for success. It takes that level of commitment to complete a difficult and long term goal. And successful weight loss is a long term goal–a life long change. It is not a quick fix for a problem, but a permanent modification. And that long term reality is what cause most people’s problems. They want to lose 10 pounds for their vacation, but that need is not great enough, not powerful enough to carry them through to lasting success.

I said that most people don’t possess that passion, and without that passion success is unlikely. Am I suggesting that everyone who reads this is doomed to fail? Not really. Passion, drive and commitment can be learned. It is not a genetic thing, but a learned reality. And just like anything else, it will not come easily, but anything worthwhile will rarely be easy.

But it is almost always worth it. So, how do you gain passion?

Come back tomorrow for the next “P” of success.