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.