Focus on Your Goals and Accolades will Follow

For me this week has been a really great experience, taking a stand against my poor eating habits and trying to change my behavior. I found it amazing how making decisions about eating effects my daily life. When I look at the past 7 days, I am a bit surprised by how many times I was engaged into this process. I think about how many times the traps my old programming tried to take me away from my plan. I think about the cognitive efforts that I had to go through to endure and prevail them. But, the most startling piece of it for me was the number of times a decision was made in regards to food.

These decisions encompassed more than just the three meals a day. It was dealing with all of the cravings, the numbers of time I passed by food that was readily available, how many times I watched others eat food, being offered food, serving someone else food, seeing food commercials, hearing food commercials, driving by food restaurants, driving by the grocery store. I even went to my home improvement store over the weekend and there at the check-out counter was food to purchase and eat.

We make decisions about food many, many times a day. There is no question that my decisions this past week swung from being predominantly bad for me to being predominately good.

Life Lesson #4: Focus on the goals that you set for yourself and the accolades of success will follow.

We tell the marching band students all the time to concentrate on doing their personal best. That no matter where they are in the learning process, when they focus on their own personal achievement, great things will happen for the whole organization. There are so many levels of success available within the activity that the students can find opportunities to reach, exceed, and set new goals for themselves all along the way. As a result, their competitive success becomes a by-product.

For me this week was focused on my goal of managing my eating behavior and starting the process of reprogramming the way I approach food. This week was successful and as a result, my by-product of the effort was losing 5 pounds.

I am looking forward to moving ahead.