A lesson in Heart x

19^th June 2011

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong. Charles Wadworth

It’s Father Day today so if you’re luckily enough to have one, let him know you love him.  I was just looking for a little story or something relevant to father’s day to share with you but instead I came across a short story about overcoming obstacles, because when your trying to lose weight there are lots of obstacles thrown in front of you, it’s a bit like a hurdle race!  This story also made me think of a member I weighed yesterday, I covered a lovely morning meeting in Brownhills and it was great to meet different people, the one stuck in my mind though because she had the ‘but syndrome’, no matter what solution you’d have given her, she would have said ‘yes but…..’ so in the end I just said, for every problem (i.e. obstacle) there is a solution, you just have to find it yourself and I’m delighted to say by the end of the meeting, she’d found one solution to on of those obstacles, so that was a result.  Anyway here’s the story;

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A LESSON IN HEART

A lesson in "heart" is a little, 10 year old girl, Sarah, who was born with a muscle missing in her foot. She wears a brace all the time. She came home one beautiful spring day to tell her Mom she had competed in "field day"- that's where they have lots of races and other competitive events. Because of her leg support, Mom's mind raced as she tried to think of encouragement for Sarah, things she could say to her about not letting this get her down. But, before she could get a word out, she said "Daddy, I won two of the races!" Mom couldn't believe it! And then Sarah said, "I had an advantage." Ah. Mom thought. She must have been given a head start...some kind of physical advantage. But again, before any comment was made she said, "Daddy, I didn't get a head start... My advantage was I had to try harder!"

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Inspiring, if you have an obstacle of whatever kind, ‘try harder’, don’t use it as an excuse, don’t run and hide from it all, don’t get angry, don’t get sad, don’t give up and resign yourself to what you are now rather than what you want to be – TRY HARDER! 

Sticking to a diet is always going to have its difficulties but nothing worth having comes easy does it.  Why so difficult, because it means changing and most of us don’t like change, it also involves resisting temptation which is absolutely everywhere isn’t it.  Just note how many times in one single day you have to resist temptation and congratulation yourself every time you manage to resist rather than beating yourself up when you notice the one time you didn’t resist!  If I think back to yesterday one example would be I popped in the Tesco garage to get mom a puzzle book and I spotted the peanuts and thought “mmm peanuts” then I had a mental conversation with myself and said something like, “if you hadn’t come in here and spotted them on the shelf you wouldn’t have even thought about peanuts today, so you don’t want any, you’ll have forgot about them by the time you get home”, and I had forgotten until now so it worked, I also resisted the reduced pizza that was massive and would have cost me millions of ProPoints I’m sure, but I didn’t resist the pizza in my freezer when I got home but at least it was a lot lower than what could have been. 

As long as we aim to be our best always, then no one can expect anymore from us. 

xx