My motto was always to keep swinging. Whether I was in a slump or feeling badly or having trouble off the field, the only thing to do was keep swinging. ~ Hank Aaron

Throughout history, sports figures have given us a plethora of motivational quotes to keep trying, not only on the field, but off it as well.

Hank Aaron was considered one of the greatest baseball players of all time, yet according to his quote above, there were times where he felt badly, was in a slump, or he had trouble off the field.

How did he fix it?  The only thing to do was to keep swinging.

When looking back on 2011, there were ups and downs in everyone’s lives – the economy was poor, people were losing their jobs, people were losing their loved ones, you name it, and people were experiencing slumps, feeling badly, or having trouble off the field.

The only thing to do is to keep swinging.

Success to Failure Ratio

In baseball, if you are able to maintain a .350 batting average for a lifetime, you would have your own ticket to the Hall of Fame.

Have you ever stopped to realize that this means that a batter is only successful 35% of the time?

When trying to maintain your weight, do you feel that your success to failure ratio is low?

• Maybe you wanted to get through the holidays without a deviation.
• Or maybe your planned menu that you were so careful to pack was forgotten at home and so you had to improvise.
• Or maybe the scale you packed in your luggage so carefully to be diligent on vacation was lost and there is no way to monitor your progress.

Always remember that those that have been successful with maintenance are just like Hank Aaron – they experience the slumps, the feeling badly, or the trouble off the field – yet they get right back up and keep swinging.

Failures = Greatest Lessons?

In life, we will make many mistakes.  It’s inevitable.

However, these mistakes can be learning opportunities – they can shape us into who we are through trial and error.  By making mistakes, we learn what works and what doesn’t, and then hopefully we stop doing what doesn’t.

The mistakes we make today will become tomorrow’s good choices.

We cherish and remember successes because of the lessons and stories behind them.  When you are on a path to a goal, or dream, there will be bumps along the way, and this will build character, and teach us about perseverance.

When learning about your body, what it needs, what it wants, what makes it run optimally, are you learning from the mistakes you make along the way?

Wasn’t it Albert Einstein that once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”?

If you change course when something isn’t working, you keep swinging.

Praise your Resilience

Being living creatures, we are resilient.  Can you imagine a lioness giving up every time she failed to make a kill?  Her pride would starve to death.

If we give up every time we experienced a slump, feeling badly, or trouble off the field, we would cease to grow and move forward.

You do have the ability to pick up the bat again and again and just swing – chances are you won’t hit it every time you swing, but if you just keep swinging, it will connect.

Just keep swinging.

2012

No matter what your 2011 was like – put it away – learn from the mistakes and move on.  Keep swinging.

A New Year is upon us – we have a chance to make things better than they were the year before.  We have a chance to strive for success in this journey we call life.

Let’s all make 2012 the year we feel driven towards success.

• Success in weight control
• Success in health control
• Success in emotional control
• Success in physical control
• Success in financial control

What will you strive for in 2012?

Give Me 10 Minutes

At the end of every year (for the past 4 years), I have performed this little exercise with my readers.  It’s fun, it’s interactive, and it helps focus on things that you WILL be able to do in 2011, if you just keep swinging.

Set your stop watch for just ten minutes, and in those ten minutes I want you to list all the things you KNOW you will be able to do in 2012 (even if you won’t have a chance to get them done) – things that are weight related that you couldn’t do before, or that were next to impossible to do.  Things that you just didn’t want to do because you were morbidly obese or for that matter, just overweight.

These are the rules:

• Start each statement with “I am so happy and grateful now that”
• You can only spend TEN MINUTES
• Let your mind run wild, be whimsical, be realistic, it doesn’t matter
• Concentrate on things that are weight loss related – things you couldn’t do before that you will be able to do when weight isn’t an issue

And remember, KEEP SWINGING!!!

Yup, that is me at the moment. And leave it to Dawn to get me there. I have spent the bulk of the evening researching a secret society of hCG people that are doing the protocol in a special way, which incidentally is right up my alley. Being passive aggressive in nature though, I am not ready to share. I have to experiment with it a bit before I divulge this information to the masses. Yes, me, the woman that you all have grown to love over the past 1.5 plus years – (well at least I hope you all still love me! HA!) – is obsessed about something again, whoda thunk???

This time it’s really gotten me excited. Seriously – when I say it’s up my alley it really is. But here is the thing (you knew that was coming didn’t you???) the people that are involved in this are a strange lot. They tend to be a bit over the top. In all my research for this ‘culture’ over the past 1.5 plus years, there has only been one person that I could follow religiously on a blog because I considered her “normal” – the others were just too weird for my tastes. Even though I believe in what they are doing, they just have a tendency to go a little bonkers about it.

That is what scares me about this, and I told Dawn this in chat. I don’t want to be seen as one of those kinds of people. I don’t want people looking at me saying, geesh, what is she doing NOW and acting like this for. I don’t want to be one of those people. I just want to be thin, healthy and happy. Is that so wrong? HA! I did tell Dawn to never let me get like that, and that if I was starting to show those tendencies, then I have given her advance notice to slap me silly and bring me back down to earth.

So there it is, I am gonna test it out tomorrow.

By the way, my stats can be found on this page: Current Stats

Today, my meals were not spectacular. In actuality, I ate mostly fruit – I had to drive out of town and I was totally unprepared, so I survived on mostly fruit but not apples. It’s been a while since I have been able to handle anything apple. I think protocol has ruined that for me for awhile, ugh.

But I did have this crazy idea to try my hand at making some Cream of Celery Soup, and that is what you see pictured here. I used vegetable broth, cauliflower (cooked and mashed) and celery with some different interesting spices. It was actually very tasty and quite satiating. The thing about mixing veggies like this? I don’t have a problem with that if those are your two veggies for the day. But that is just me, in any case YMMV!

Amie – Girl, I never like tofu, but I have always had it in some sort of soup, when I started doing research on it and found it could be fried, I was like, OH YEAH, that is SHWEET! Try it! You must might like it! Protein powder is always an option, just not for me. I don’t like the protein powders, in fact it’s an aversion!

Gina – It really was good, I really enjoyed it immensely and thought that I need to have it again!

Monica – No, never liked tofu, in fact my sister tried to get me to even eat TOFUTTI and I was like ewwww, gross. HA! But this was pretty darn good!

M – That salad was divine! Very gourmet!

This was Sunday’s Checkin – Forgot to post:

LIW – 140.6
Date of LIW – 09.22.08
Today – 145.4
# above/below LIW – Above 4.8
# gain/loss from yesterday - GAIN of 3.0

Menu:

Wet PipiKaula (Hawaiian Dish made with Beef, Sugar and Soy Sauce)
Broccoli and Cheese Casserole (made with Campbell soups)
Assortment of Raw Veggies with Curry Dip and a Bean Dip
Fried Vegan Spring Rolls (made with Morningstar crumbles) with Thai Sweet Chili Sauce
Vegan Carrot Cake (OMG – this was delish! – 2 pieces!!!)
A bit of leftover chili with some tortilla chips
A few bites of ruffles

Not even gonna try to total up the garbage that I ate – but I had a WONDERFUL time – the houseful of people enjoyed the food, so did I, and the three pounds was worth it. I so know I am retaining water, I hardly peed all day yesterday, no matter how much water I drank.

I am not gonna worry about it – I have too many other things to worry about right now – the flight for one – you wanna talk about some STRESS that is building up inside of me? Stress = Cortisol = Weight Gain

And – TOM IS STILL LURKING BUT NOT SHOWING UP!!! I had those dreaded warning cramps yesterday, and I just know he is going to put a full showing in on the plane and that will be just miserable.

Ok, enough about me, how did all the Saturday night people do???

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Monday’s:

LIW – 140.6
Date of LIW – 09.22.08
Today – 144.6
# above/below LIW – Above 4.0
# gain/loss from yesterday - LOSS of .8

Menu:

coffee with heavy cream
2 fried eggs in bacon grease
about 12 naked chicken wings
curry dip with raw veggies
feta avocado salad

Ok, well, I wasn’t really planning on trying to do anything yesterday, I was so stinking busy getting ready to go that I pretty much didn’t eat all day. Had a panic attack in the middle of the day (I don’t like to fly) and pretty much my stomach is upset as I write this.

The next time you see me I will be in Hawaii (I think) – unless I get delayed and the airport has internet.

Will miss you all. Here I GO!!!