Archive for the ‘Donna's Diet’ Category

A story the Lord gave to me

My Daughter Donna-

Imagine someone came to your door and presented you with a brand-new, 4, 000 sq foot, completely paid for home. Every little thing in this house is brand new, right down to the smallest tile and shiniest door knob. This house has everything you need for yourself and your family, and it is yours to keep, completely free, as long as you take care of it.

What will you do?  Chances are you’ll keep it cleaner than you kept your old house.  You’ll do all the regular chores, but you’ll go the extra mile.  You’ll move the furniture and vacuum under it.  You’ll get down on your hands and knees to scrub the kitchen floor. You’ll even put those little furniture-pad under your dining table so as not to scratch the hardwood floors.  Hey, you might even hire a housecleaner, since you no longer have a mortgage!

When you first move it, you’ll make every effort to get your family on board to take care of the gift you’ve been given.  You won’t allow kids to eat on the carpet, you’ll make people take their shoes off at the front door, and you’ll even wash the windows.  You’ll buy one of those little squeegees and clean the showers doors daily. You’ll clean behind the toilet.  Remember, this house is yours free as long as you take care of it.

If you were given this gift, I know you’d do everything you could to take care of it, to ensure that you and your family got to enjoy the gift as long as possible.  You’d want your kids to grow up in this wonderful home (that has a sport court in the back!) and you want your husband and you to enjoy the blessing of not wondering how you’re going to make this month’s mortgage. Your new home will be a place of peace, love and coziness.  All who come here will feel at home. As long as you take care of it.

You’ve been given a similar gift, but you don’t take such good care of it.  You’ve been given a physical body, a gift from the Me, and it is the home of My Holy Spirit. What’s more, your body is not just the home of the Holy Spirit, it’s the TEMPLE of the Lord.

So why do you treat it like an old shack, whose floors are dirty and whose streets are clogged with grease?  Instead of treating your body like the beautiful home it is, you treat it like a hotel room that you’re only using briefly, and that someone else will come in to clean later.

Donna, it is your responsibility to take care of your body.  YOU are to be a place of love, peace and a sense of home for your children for many years.  So why are you feeding it garbage?  Why are you destroying the Temple of God that I’ve given you a precious gift, yours to use for as long as I deem?  What if My plan is to give you 90 years, but because of over-indulgence and laziness, you only get 60? 

It’s time, Donna.  It’s time to take care of your home and treat it as the beautiful gift that it is.

Donna Venning

Out of the mouth of babes….

On our way to a field trip this morning, I drove the kids through a Krispy Kreme Doughnut drive through (the closest one to us is 25 minutes away so we have to be going “that way” in order to stop there). After my kids ate theirs, my son saw the extra one in the box (for me) and asked if he could have it.  I said “No, that one is for Mommy.”  Without missing a beat, he asked “Aren’t you supposed to be on Weight Watchers?”

Yes, I’ve got my kids and husband involved in this whole diet and nutrition thing.  When Kevin said that to me, I suspect his real motive was to get the doughnut for himself, but it was kinda cute that he was thinking about my weight loss goals when I wasn’t!

Week one has passed.  I stayed exactly the same weight, which I’m kind of surprised at.  I’m okay with it (as long as it’s not a gain, I’m good) but I did cut down on things this past week….snacks, eating out (such as the aforementioned Krispy Kreme trip), goodies.  I guess the “moderation” diet is not really a diet at all and I will actually have to be more drastic in my approach. Not starvation-drastic, just more than “moderate.”

I was thinking this week about my kids.  My daughter still sucks her thumb (she’ll be six in two weeks) and my two-year-old uses a binkie. My oldest son was also a binkie addict and I’m okay with that, I just think it’s odd that all of my children had such oral fixations!  Anyway, I’ve told me daughter that she needs to stop sucking her thumb and that we’ll have to come up with a way for her to do that (I was going to buy a contraption that you put on their thumb at night, but then I found out it costs $70).  Anyway, my point is that I keep telling her that she’s going to have to stop and then I realized this week the amount of discipline it will take for her to stop.  It’s going to take a real sacrifice; she’ll have to either go cold-turkey or slowly wean off it.

The thought occurred to me that in order for me expect my kids to show/use discipline, I’ll have to show some myself. It will take discipline and sacrifice to get to a healthy weight, the same as it will take discipline and sacrifice for my daughter to stop sucking her thumb.  It’s easy to expect my kids to just do it (stop their bad habits) but when it comes to me, I find lots of reasons (excuses) not to.  So that’s what’s ruminating in my mind this week.

 So a few months ago we announced in the ezine “The Return of Donna’s Diet” blog.

And then there were no new posts.

That should tell you how well my diet went at that point.

Yi.  So here I am again, back at the start.  I keep telling myself that one of these times it’s gonna stick. I have so many motivations for losing weight; so many reasons to do it.  But I just don’t seem to do it.

As I sat here tonight eating a box of pop tarts (yes, a BOX), I thought of the verse “That which I want to do I don’t do, that which I do, I hate.”  Man, that sums up me and food.  I have such great intentions to eat healthy.  And the meals I make are healthy.  But then the evening comes, I’m alone at my desk, the kids are in bed, and I start munching.  And if my husband is in the area (in my office, I mean) I start getting really irritable at him because I can’t sneak my snacks.

What’s so ridiculous about the whole situation (besides getting annoyed at him for no good reason) is that why do I think I’m SNEAKING them at all?  I mean, even if I manage to sneak the food in (like I did with the poptarts), who do I think I’m fooling?  The extra weight I’m carrying around, the six sizes of clothes in the closet (12-22), the rolls of fat aren’t exactly hidden, right?  So I might sneak the act of eating, but the results show.

Anyway, back to the Romans verse.  That which I do, I hate.  Really, I do hate feeling so icky all the time.  I feel sluggish, irritable, uncomfortable and tired all the time. 

I’m not following any diet plan.  I had joined Weight Watchers (for the third or fourth time) but I didn’t follow it faithfully.  My current plan is to try to stop snacking, so that’s this week’s goal: no snuck snacks at night.

I’ll be honest when I write next week.  If I sneak or cheat, I’ll own up to it. I weighed in at 244 today; I’ll let you know where I am next week.  My goal for the week is to not snack at night and to not eat out.  Sometimes I’ll run an errand at night just to go alone and sneak a trip through the McDonald’s drivethru.  None of that this week.

See you next Wednesday! This is the Real Return of Donna’s Diet.

donna

Hi Friends,

A year of postings successes and failures has caught up with me.  I am taking a temporary furlough (not from healthy living, but from the blog) until January 2010.  At first I thought I’d just take a month or two off of blogging, but then we’d be at the holidays….so I decided that with all the New Year’s Resolutions to lose weight that start in January, that might be a good time to restart the blogs and hopefully have some success tips to share with you.

The Yahoo Blog site is still up and running, so I invite you to join us there for encouragement and accountability.  Email me at donna@teachmagazine.com if you’d like info on how to join the yahoo site.

See you in January, but if I decided to post before then, we’ll put a link in the ezine!

donna

Right back where I started from

What a year.  Today I went back through the weight loss charts I’ve been keeping since last October and…throughout the year I lost 33 lbs.

Woo-hoo, right?

Not quite.  None of those lbs stayed off and I never lost more than 14 in one consecutive stretch.  It was usually lose five, gain four; lose 6, gain 8, etc, etc.

I’m not feeling depressed about it, but it does make me go “wow…where could I be if I’d been more committed?  What (that I’ve eaten) in the past ten months has been more important than getting my health in check?”

Vanity, shame and guilt are only temporary motivators. Even the knowledge that “someday” I’ll have medical concerns (and honestly, I have a bunch already) is not a permanent motivator for me, probably because those motivators are based on feelings, which change so often.   I keep thinking about a line from Pride and Prejudice, when Elizabeth is talking with her father.  They’ve discovered that someone has stepped in a paid a great deal of money to cover up a potentially embarrassing family situation. The father says something along these lines…“I’m heartily ashamed of myself, Lizzie.  But don’t worry…the feeling will pass…and probably sooner than it ought.”  It’s the totally honesty in that quote, that he probably won’t feel ashamed for too long because he’s been bailed out…that’s what’s got me intrigued.

I’m questioning whether I really need something to motivate me.  Don’t get me wrong…I’m not at that stage where I’m soooo disciplined that I don’t need “motivation” to keep me going.  What I’m talking about is this…I’ve had a ton of good reasons or motivating factors for losing weight in the past year, but I think I’m beyond those now. I think what I’m learning is that I don’t need something to motivate me, I just need to commit to change. I just need to be obedient to what I know God has for me.  When I eat healthy, when I exercise, when I get enough sleep, I am better equipped to handle what God has called me to…motherhood, my role as a wife and even more, my “role” as an ambassador for Christ.  I do none of these things well when I’m rolling in gluttony.

I heard recently that the Bible has more to say on gluttony than it does on sexual immorality.  I don’t know the accuracy of this, however…I have NOT looked into it yet.  However, I will spend the next two weeks doing a word study on gluttony and let you know at the end of the time what I’ve discovered.  In the meantime, I’m not going to think about my temporal reasons for losing weight, but I’m going to focus on being committed no matter how I feel.  Kind of a new endeavor for me, as far as food is concerned.  I decided this past week that one of my favorite pastimes is lying in bed, reading a diet book while eating a bowl of cereal. 

I’m also revving up to do a sugar detox.  I’ve been sensing God calling me to it and I’ve been stalling.  Then last weekend a friend told me about when she did a sugar detox two years ago…it was the confirmation that I needed.  My plan is to start next Wednesday, so please pray for me for the detox from the 19^th to the 24^th.  I’ll let you know next week how it’s going, even though I’ll only be on day two and I’ve heard it’s days four and five that are the tough ones.