Happy Weekend! Happy Holiday Saturday Weekend!

Today is a day to celebrate because it is a HOLIDAY WEEKEND!!

How will you celebrate?  I'll tell you how I will NOT celebrate:

I will NOT celebrate by thinking I can "relax" my eating plan and take a vacation from my body.

I will NOT celebrate by sabotaging myself TODAY to take the pressure off Monday.  How THAT would look if I chose to do it would be that SINCE I knew I was going to be celebrating Memorial Day with friends and family at a BBQ, I was anticipating that stressful situation (because I chose to make it stressful and all about what I could "eat" or not instead of focusing on the social aspect) I decided to be "bad" on my "diet" TODAY so that I could then just say "well I'm already off, I might as well ride this tide and start over on Tuesday".

Have you ever done that?  Have you ever pre-sabotaged yourself so that you could really cut loose "guilt free" on the occasion you wanted to?

Say you have a Birthday tomorrow, would you go off plan today so that you could relieve the tension of "having" to stay on your "diet" on your Birthday?

I used to do that ALL THE TIME, when health was NOT my primary concern.  When the scale, and the number it read wasn't even my primary concern.  I recognize that I used to get that attitude when all I was really worried about was NOT GAINING WEIGHT.

I had to really dig down deep and make a decision towards OPTIMAL HEALTH when I decided that my journey wasn't simply going to be about NOT GAINING WEIGHT. 

What is your goal?  Do you enter your weekend thinking "as long as I can maintain this week I'm happy".  Really?  That is GREAT thinking if you are in maintenance, but are you in maintenance?  If not, then the most appropriate thing to do in order to continue to move towards what you SAID you wanted is to make a plan for the weekend and stay on your plan.

I know all about "but it's hard on the weekends I'm so unstructured, whereas I'm structured with my schedule during the week and so it is easy."

Well I ask you, who is in charge of your schedule on the weekends?  YOU!  You can fix that whole "unstructured/unscheduled" thing in 5 minutes on a Friday evening by taking out a piece of paper and creating a loose structure for your weekend.  Either that, or just get comfortable having your Program running in the background, as the wallpaper so to speak of your weekend, so that structured OR unstructured there is one constant, and that is your eating plan.  Your purposeful, intentional eating plan, the one that you said you wanted to do in order to get where you want to go.

There is a great little feature on your cell-phone called an "Alarm" which you can even set JUST for Saturdays and Sundays to repeat.

Set your alarms to go off every 3 hours on Saturdays and Sundays.  This is your "eat and drink" alarm.  When you wake up, first thing, drink 8 ounces of water, and then every time the alarm goes off (should be 6 times), eat a Medifast Meal (or your Lean and green) and drink 16 ounces of water.  Then drink 8 more ounces of water at bedtime and you are good to go!

There!  Now you are "structured". 

Do you see what you are really saying when you are saying "but it's so hard when I'm not structured like during the week"?  You are saying that you have no intrinsic motivation to do this plan.  You are saying that you can do this only when you don't have to think about it, only when you are so distracted by other things that yummy food thoughts can't enter your brain.  You are saying that you lack the foresight and the planning capabilities to take care of yourself over the weekend, that you are simply responding in an undisciplined and spontaneous way to things that happen TO YOU over the weekend. 

You are letting life happen to YOU instead of YOU happening on LIFE.

Is this you?  Are you letting life happen to YOU? 

I know that for much of my adult life I allowed life to happen to ME.  This made me a victim.  A victim of my own making. 

Do you wake up on Monday mornings (or on this Holiday weekend, Tuesday morning) and feel like you were a victim of the weekend?  Then STOP IT!  Honestly, stop being a victim.  Be a victor instead.  Schedule your weekend.  Schedule your meals.  Do a little bit of planning and preparation so that you don't allow yourself to be tossed around like a boat with no sail on a choppy sea, with no direction. 

Maintain.  Your.  Course.

Rinse and Repeat!