Desired Outcomes For Thanksgiving

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Imagine two scenarios:

1. You do what you usually do over the next couple of days. You eat and drink how you have in the past and you get the outcome you have all the years. The bloating, the cramping and the guilt/shame/drama about the food like in all the years past. Your relatives get to you per usual, your spouse is still annoyed about the political fight at Easter and your sister won’t shut up already about how amazing her new promotion is. Your Mom just told you that your least favorite cousin is coming into town last minute and whatever you do, please do NOT bring up what happened between him and his wife or his old job or anything to do with his life over the last 15 years it is a SORE subject.
2. You decide you want something better for yourself. You want to wake up on Monday morning feeling fabulous, zero regrets and knowing everything will fit in your closet. Peace with your choices is the top priority for you when you think about how you want be. You intend to focus on your friends, family, football and having fun not the food. Sure, your family has it’s merry band of eccentrics, but every ones does.You are choosing a different way to be this year, and you know it all starts with how you go into the weekend.

It is up to you to pick a desired income and execute it. The thing is if we do not intentionally pick #2, the well worn path of #1 will be picked for us by habit and years of overeating, over reacting, over drinking and complaining in the bathroom via text to our best friend.

Once we have decided we want a better outcome for ourselves, it is up to us to make it happen.

So how do we get to where we want to be? By making it happen?

So let’s work backwards from our desired goal.

We want to wake up on Monday morning feeling fabulous because we didn’t eat tons of food we know that is not healthy for us, with zero regrets and at peace with all of our food choices.

Then our food and drink choices will need to be on point. So, our food the rest of the weekend, with the exception of the Thanksgiving meal should be our regular everyday food. Resist the urge to eat leftover pie for breakfast and there really isn’t much of a need for you to eat everything in the fridge when there are so many other people in your family who can.

The meal of Thanksgiving should be primarily low glycemic vegetables, turkey and one starch you absolutely love, not 5. Lay off the alcohol and drink a lot of water. Get some exercise earlier in the morning and do not make a meal of the appetizers.

In order focus on your friends, family, football and having fun not the food, we need to be present in the moment and not with what we are going to eat. Think about who you are with and what is currently going on, try and stay away from thoughts of the past or worrying about the future.

So what if your husband chooses to be annoyed about the political argument your family got into 7 months ago? If he wants to hold a grudge and be miserable on a Holiday, he is choosing that path.

Be happy for your sister and her big promotion. Ask her what she finds most challenging about her job, the most rewarding. Actually listen. She wants to talk about it all the time for some reason, give her an audience.

Who knows what the real story is with your cousin? All you can do is be pleasant, be open and tell him it great to see him again. Keep the energy light and intend to have a fun time.

Sure, a handful of other Thanksgivings were not the things Hallmark movies were made of, but no ones truly are, and that is ok. Some of the funniest memories I have ever had of Thanksgiving are the years where my friend forgot to turn on the deep fryer for the turkey, when we thought about going to the Macy’s Day parade to only realize it was -10 with the windchill and watched it on tv with the rest of the world,  or the time my then three year old kept coming into the kitchen asking my husband “when is the big chicken going to be ready? I am very hungry”

We can have what we want if we are willing to set a goal and work towards it, even if that means we might need to reverse engineer it a little.

Tomorrow

What to do instead of the traditional meal

We will take a combination Life Coach/Holistic Health

and Visualization perspective to get you the desired outcome you want when it comes to how you want to feel, act and be on TODAY.

It will be FUN!!

To learn more about me, my programs and my upcoming book “Why Can’t I Stick To My Diet?” links are in the comments

Photo by Stacey Natal