First Order of Business

Day #2

Good morning, and welcome back.  You’ve already made a positive change just by clicking your way back to me.  This is called curiosity and open-minded-ness, (or at least nosy-rosy-ness) and we can be friends.  Mention your  tambourine or your karaoke microphone and you’ll never get rid of me!

I am struggling not to dump too much information into each day, because as one of my balcony people reminds me, she doesn’t want to know the “why.”  She just wants to know the “how to.”  But I am hard-wired to make sense out of things, so you’ll just have to glaze over during the times that I get too uppity with the facts, and jump right to the action portion of the program!

Your new habit today is simple.  DRINK WATER.

I’m not telling you (yet) to stop drinking the sodas and the Starbux and the rest of what you drink because you “hate” water.  (Sidenote...I don’t get that.  What does that mean, you hate water?)

But I will touch briefly on why you MUST drink water.  #1 reason is because your body needs the liquid.  Think of your body from this point forward as a car.  Now I don’t know much about cars, nor do I care.  But I know that gas is a must and so is oil.  Without gas, you stop, and without oil, you burn up.  So think of the water that you’re putting in your body as the oil going in the car.  

#2 reason you need to drink water is to get rid of water.  True story:  one Chan’s chinese meal later, I’m +2.4 pounds.  Now I know logically that I couldn’t have gained that in weight.  So I drank water, got rid of water, and just like magic, the next day, it was flushed.  Literally.  It takes water to lose water.  

#3 reason.  It keeps your stomach from feeling so dang empty you reach for anything.  

Lots of people eat when they’re thirsty because they don’t know the difference.  

I have a client who emailed me not long ago and said that she HATES (her all caps throughout, not mine) water, and the ONLY way she can CHOKE any down is to put Crystal Light in it, and she KNOWS that drinking something with artificial sweetener in it ALL DAY LONG is probably not good for her, but isn’t it better than no water at all?    

No.  I’m going to give it to you straight, friends.  This is not where you come for permission to treat your body badly.  We’re going to talk a lot about my three legged stool in the coming blogs, but suffice it to say that drinking anything but water all day long is NOT moderate.  Would you agree?

So for today, your new habit to begin forming is simple.  

For each drink of something that isn’t water, drink the same amount of water.  (My trick, for what it’s worth, is to drink water less than ice cold.  It tastes different and it goes down much easier!)

The goal, of course, is to replace your liquids with water ultimately.  But I’m not telling you to give anything up today.  I’m telling you to match your junky liquid with good, pure water.  

And one more thing?  I don’t mean to offend anybody when I talk about how much I weigh or what I’ve gained or lost. But like it or not, weight is a benchmark.  A measure of how you’ve treated your machine.   No, this project’s goal to worth to change old habits into new ones is not about your weight.  I don’t care what you weigh, and though I know you will arrive at a healthy place by following these simple steps,  this isn’t about how much you’re going to lose.  I mean this:  my daily goal is to FEEL good in my skin.  My goal is to live a long, healthy, active life.  Does that sound like something you’re interested in?  

See you tomorrow!  Nature calls!