I made a decision this week that I feel is going to have a huge impact of my life. Huge, positive impact on my weight loss, my finances, my stress, my time with my family, and my future. I joined a health and wellness company with products that could potentially put an end to this feud I’ve had going on with my weight for 17 years. By joining this company and getting in on nearly the ground level, I will have a huge potential for extra income, which will allow me to lessen my daycare capacity over the next year as some of my babies leave me as they age up into preschool.

I realized quite a while ago that my favorite days at daycare are the days when schedules end up as such that I only have 3 kiddos. present. Those are the days when I feel like I really accomplish educational things with them and spend good, quality time with each child. And it doesn’t matter which children are here, just that 3 seems to be my magic number when it comes to childcare. Being as so many other daycares opt to not accept infants, I think I’d like to only accept infants. This way, I’d also have some built in space for an occasional toddler if the opportunity ever came along for a set of siblings. Plus, babies are my forte! I am so confident in my baby whispering abilities, but with toddlers I feel so lost sometimes when it comes to the tantrums and discipline, I feel I let them get away with too much because I’m afraid of being too harsh and skewing the line of some of the laws/regulations. So, I err on the side of caution and end up stressing myself out beyond belief.

How does this all pertain to the ol’ diet, you ask? ALL OF IT PERTAINS TO THE OL’ DIET! When I’m calm, confident, and successful, my eating and exercise habits are outstanding. When I’m frazzled, unsure and feeling like a failure, I don’t even try to eat right or get up and move. Believe me, I have felt like such a failure the last month…I tried to reboot the diet this week and lasted for one day (actually, not even that whole day, I gave up by dinner).

This is why I really want to throw myself into these new health and wellness products and document this entire process for you each day. I am the perfect person to try out these products, too, I am a total skeptic so you can all but rule out placebo effect with me! Before I decided to take the plunge, though, I searched the Internet high and low for testimonials — positive AND negative — and couldn’t find any negative. My products are arriving at my house today and I’m going to sort them and plan how often and what time of day to take everything. So, away we go!

*********************************************

Just as I was typing that first bit, my products arrived! I received a crash course in all the items, and some useful tips as well! I spread out all my new goodies on the floor and devised a plan for when I’m eating and/or drinking each of these products (I had 3 things back ordered, but I factored them into the routine and will add them whenever they arrive).

I’m sorry I haven’t had recommendations of new recipes or pics of diet-y foods lately. I warned you guys, when I stray from the diet, I straaaaaaaaayyyy from the diet. Like a long and winding road to Strayville where I take an nice, open-ended vacation. But I now have 3 months until Belize, things are getting real. Reservations are made, plane tickets are bought, passports are being processed. I always have it in my mind that Mondays are start days for new routines, but I’m going to start tomorrow with all my new products. I judge a gymnastics meet in Topeka for 5 hours tomorrow (not the usually 9-10hrs), so there’s no reason I can’t plan ahead enough to make it through one lunch and one afternoon snack outside of the house.

So, here’s to huge, positive changes! *glass clinks all around* if I had to choose a song that best fit today, I would go with something a little unexpected from my classical side…Claude Debussy’s “La Cathédrale Engloutie,” translating to “the sunken cathedral.” The story I was told in one of my music theory classes was that Debussy was inspired to write this when he was standing in front of a beautiful cathedral in France after a rainstorm, he looks down and sees the cathedral reflected in a giant puddle in front of his and imagines it is another cathedral exists in the water below. To me, it’s about imagining what worlds lie beyond what we see in our present, imagining what other worlds could exist. I’m going push myself to start seeing myself existing in a world where I am already at a healthy weight and active again, where I am already doing exactly what I want for a living, already buying clothes in the sizes I need to be wearing, already seeing the numbers on the scale that I should be seeing. Sure, you can’t ignore the present, but maybe I can change my mindset and start seeing my life play out how it will when I reach my goals…instead of my goals being impossible daydreams that seem too far away and ridiculous to grasp. Night, all…

~~ Amie