The Oatmeal Raisin Cookies that Weren't

I do not like oatmeal raisin cookies - primarily because the raisins are not chocolate chips. Which makes it the perfect cookie for me! Let me explain.  I love baking, any kind of baking, cookies, brownies, cakes, you name it.  I also like to eat what I am baking, the dough, the finished product, it doesn't matter. You see where I'm going with this - losing weight and baking things I like, do not mix well.

When a request comes from school, church, wherever, for people to bake for an event, I'm there, no problem, I will bake something. However, as you have just read, there is a problem.  So Rachel suggested to me, which seems so very simple now, to bake something that I don't like to eat.  How simple is that? Yet it never occurred to me.  I guess I just always thought that if I didn't like oatmeal raisin cookies, no body liked oatmeal raisin cookies. And since I just love any dessert with chocolate in it, everyone loves chocolate. Apparently this is not true - although I still have a hard time comprehending how some people just don't like chocolate. I guess it is just one of those great mysteries in life.  And so I baked those oatmeal raisin cookies for church and not once was I tempted to eat the dough or have one after they were baked. It worked, such a simple thing, yet never occurred to me.

It is funny how sometimes the simplest things in life can have the biggest affect on us.  The mere suggestion of baking something you don't like saved me probably 300-400 calories just for that day. There are so many simple things we can do to help ourselves and others. Just telling someone who has been losing weight, even if it's just a little, how good they look, can make all the difference.

And this would have been a great story if it had actually happened that way, but it didn't. You see, I started writing this blog a couple of days before I baked those cookies - writing down what I expected to happen.  After all, I had a plan, a good plan, almost foolproof really...with one major flaw...  Since I don't like raisins, I don't keep them in the house and it was too late to go out and get some.  However, I do of course keep chocolate chips on hand - always. So oatmeal raisin cookies turned into chocolate chip cookies. This simple plan which was going to save me 300-400 calories that day flopped miserably in an instant. Yes, I ate the dough, and yes, I ate the cookies - a perfectly good plan, gone.

So you're probably wondering, "Why is she telling us this story, this is not inspiring, it was a horrible failure." Well, I share it because life is full of failures and setbacks, sometimes they are little and sometimes they are big, but that doesn't mean we give up. It means we learn from our failures and next time hopefully things turn out different.    After all, its often our failures that ultimately put us on the right path. And I think it's important for people to get the whole picture. It"s not always easy, and there will be many more times in my life that I will face failure, but my hope is that with each time, I learn something new that I can use to get me back on track.  

The plan was really good, I just hadn't prepared properly for it. I guess it's not enough to have a plan, you have to make sure you have all the pieces in place to execute it successfully. Needless to say, I will be stocking raisins in my kitchen from now on.  I have learned that.

Just Believe!

The holidays are over, thank goodness. Not that I don't like the Christmas season but boy does it mess with your eating and exercise. However, I did manage to make it through relatively unscathed.

This New Year's Eve, I started thinking about food and excercise and how I was going to continue to maintain my weight this year after I had just had a week of not exactly "following the plan" - not even close. I came to the conclusion that the only way I would be successful was if two things happened. First, I had to realize that I was doing this because it made me feel good, not anyone else, me.  And second, I had to believe - I had to believe in myself that this is something I could do.

We do things in life for different reasons, sometimes we do them because we have to, sometimes we do them because others want us to, and sometimes we do them because it makes us feel good. Those are the best things - the ones that make us feel good. Many times we do things for ourself that make us feel good, sometimes we do things for others that makes them feel good which in-turn makes us feel good, but the important thing is, it makes us feel good. We shouldn't excercise or eat properly because we have to, we should do it because we feel better. I think that is the key to being successful in any "get in shape" program. If we think of it as something we have to do to reach a goal we may succeed, however the probability of us being successful after we reach the goal goes down considerably. But if we excercise and watch what we eat because we know it makes us feel better, it's not a chore anymore, it's a choice - and that can make all the difference!

Weight loss is also a "believing" game. You have to believe that you can do it.  It's funny, as we grow older, we sometimes forget to just "believe".  I think Christmas reminds us of that, is a time for believing. It seems sad to me sometimes, the older we get, the less we believe. Remember, when you were a child and you could hardly wait until Santa put the gifts under the tree, it was magical! And then we grow older, we no longer believe in Santa, sometimes in ourselves, and sometimes in others.

We need to believe in ourselves that we can change the way we eat, we can lose weight, that others will support us in our quest, pick us up when we fall down, give us words of encouragement. They say it takes a village to raise a child, I believe it takes a community of friends to loose weight.  That's what Rachel Ryans Fitness is, a community where you will find support, encouragement and friends who will cheer you on, every step of the way.