This morning I was off to visit Team Women NCI Chapter and was looking for something to wear and grabbed a pair of black pants and put them on.  It took me a few seconds of wondering why I never had worn them before.  Because until today they would not zip.  WOO HOO.  And I had bought two pairs just alike so I have two new pairs of pants.  I was so excited I could not wait to start telling everyone.  I went and found Kevin in the kitchen making our Shakeology’s (great husband) and showed him.  Next was The Healthy Breakfast Club Call which started at 7 am and I am sure I announced it there at least twice if not three times.

And off the meeting with my Shakeology in hand.  I felt so good walking in the door I even wore red lipstick.  I felt great.  Now, what is important about this is I am 15% of the way toward achieving my weight goal, so it is a long way off still.  As I mentioned to someone else, these were definitely  not skinny pants I was getting back into.  I have a great deal of weight left to lose.  What is important was I felt successful about the progress I am making and focused on that instead of how far I have to go.

Are you giving your self the recognition and praise you deserve for all of the great decisions you make daily?  Success matters.  We talked on The Healthy Breakfast Club the other day about putting a yellow smiley face sticky on our day planner for every good choice we made.  Drank 8 ounces of water = sticker, passed on the cookies=sticker, parked farther out in the parking lot= sticker.  You get the picture!  You are taking care of your self in many ways you are not acknowledging.  Start noticing and patting your self on the back.   Starting now!

I invite you to join us at the kick off on Facebook of The Weight Room, an interactive weekly sharing about creating health in our lives!  This will be September 14th at noon pacific and all you need to join us is your computer and a Facebook profile.   And I would be honored if you joined our Fan Page!

Healthfully Yours,

Judi

I said, “Yesterday I really wanted a diet soda and if it were not for the support of my Healthy Breakfast Club members, I think I would have given in and had one.  Knowing you were there to support me was what helped me decide - NO…  If I had, I would have wasted almost four weeks of kicking the habit.”

Nancy immediately pointed out that was not true.  I would not have wasted anything.  I would still have over 21 days when my body was not filled with chemicals and artificial sweeteners.  Thanks for catching me Nancy.  How often do we do that to ourselves?  Slow to give ourselves credit and quick to criticize?  Way too often I think.

What can you congratulate yourself for today?

Find something to congratulate yourself on today!

In my last post, I had just returned from my Ali Brown, Millionaire Protege Retreat, where I had gone   looking for ways to grow my business.  And I came home with the realization I needed to focus on my health first and foremost or it wouldn’t matter what I did with my business, because I would be dead.   I set a plan to focus first on my health every day and I began in earnest and then like so many other good intentions, I started letting it slip away.  I was focusing on my health, just not making the time necessary to improve it.

In April, I also attended the four day Direct Selling Women’s Alliance event in Los Angeles and met so many great entrepreneurs.  One of the panelists, Suzan, shared that she had a morning call every Monday through Friday with the top people on her team to get everyone motivated for the day.  For some reason, this really resonated with me and I committed to her I would implement a similar program within one week.  I did not know what or who the group would involve; I just really liked the idea.  And within a few days, The Healthy Breakfast Club was born!

Now, less than one month later, we have over 60 members which are committed to achieving and/or maintaining a healthy body weight.  And the method we have chosen is to eat healthy well balanced meals and work out regularly.  No magic pills or machines, no fad diets,  no short term solutions.  The HBC is about making permanent life style changes to improve the quality of our lives and the quantity of years we have to live it.

Every weekday morning Monday through Friday, we convene our meeting on the phone from 7-7:30 AM PDT for thirty-ish minutes.  The focus on the call is always positive and celebrating each successful step we take.  Club members call in from all over the country to support, encourage, and motivate each other and miracles are happening.   With support, the members are achieving wonderful results.  Becky ran her first 5K yesterday, Suzzane has stopped eating after 7:30, Carra is working out every day, and this is my 10th day straight without any diet soda.  And for me that is a personal miracle.  I know my addiction to diet soda (and lots of it daily) was the MOST unhealthy habit in my life.  And it has been for 25 years.  At my worst, I would consume two 64 ounce Super Big Gulps of diet coke in one day.   An average was at least one 42 ounce diet coke from McDonalds and and I love when they put them on sale.

I am a smart girl and I know the chemicals and the artificial sweeteners were horrible for me and there was not a shred of nutritional value and yet I kept drinking.  Sometimes I would wake up in the morning and have leftover coke on my nightstand, warm and flat, and it would be the first thing I would drink.  My twins, Patrick and Dylan have asked me for years to please stop drinking diet soda and even for them I could not do it.  Dylan and I made an agreement that he would not eat meat if I would not drink diet soda and that lasted for about two days.  Most mortifying of all was then I found my self sneak drinking diet soda so he would not find out.  How addicted is that?

A week ago Friday, the goal I set for the weekend to my club members was to be aware of and track how much diet soda I consumed over the weekend.  No where did I even allude to the fact that I intended to not drink any - only to track and be aware.  This was on a Friday morning and I worked at home all day until Kevin got home.  And then we set off to Monterey to visit our son Patrick, who the week before had graduated Navy Boot Camp and was now at the Defense Language Institute for the next two years perfecting his Chinese!  On the way up, we stopped at Whole Foods in Thousand Oaks for dinner.  If you have ever been to one, you know they do not even sell diet soft drinks.  For the first time in my life (I swear) I BOUGHT a bottle of water to drink with dinner.  And off we went.

It was not until we went to lunch on Saturday that I realized I had not had any diet soda since at least Thursday.  Hmmmm and I was still alive and not thrashing about or biting any-one’s head off, so I made a decision to finish out the day without any and I did.  Here it is over a week later and I honestly feel I have ‘kicked the habit’.  In fact, I am already making plans to give up the next most unhealthy thing in my diet at the 30 day mark.

Was it easy?  No.  Was it as hard as I thought it would be.  No, which was kind of disappointing as I thought the more I suffered, the more I could pat myself on the back for succeeding.  Sheeshhh…talk about self punishment.  I began posting on Facebook my progress every single day and the members of The Healthy Breakfast Club rallied around in support and encouragement, as well as other friends on Facebook who are not members.  The support and cheer-leading was what inspired me every day to ‘just say no’ to diet soda.

Every step I take and you take brings us all one step closer to achieving our goals.  What step will you take today?

To learn more about The Healthy Breakfast Club or to join us go to http://www.thehealthybreakfastclub.com.  It is free, it is fun and it is about you and your health!

When you make this choice so many times and then let yourself down, you stop trusting in making yet one more  decision or commitment.  We become so afraid of letting ourselves down again that we are afraid to begin.

I came home last night from an intensive two day business workshop which was completely focused on creating tools and strategies to grow our business.  That is certainly why I went - to learn how to create more profit out of the 16 hours per day I regularly work.  Everyone there seemed to have a clear picture of where their business was going and the next step they needed to take.  I sat there feeling frustrated and confused and not knowing how to incorporate what I was learning into my businesses and how to focus in on the next step for me.  I was feeling like I did not fit in and wondering what was wrong with me.

Then I had the ah-ha, well maybe more of a duh than an ah-ha.  I realized I was focusing on the wrong area of my life completely.  Being successful in business has always come easy to me and I create successful businesses without a problem.  So it was comfortable and easy to focus all my attention in that area.

In fact, the only area in my life where I have felt like a complete failure is in losing weight and KEEPING it off.  I had lost all confidence in ever being successful in releasing the weight and not gaining it back, because this was an area in which I have never succeeded long term.  Being successful feels good - failing feels bad.  And it was much easier for me to concentrate on the areas in my life I felt good.

But it has long since past the point where my weight is about looking hot or wearing great outfits.  At this point, it is about making a choice to improve the quality of my life and to keep on living period.

I made the decision at this “business workshop” to put business in second place in life and make my health number one.  It even scared me to say it, because even when I said it, I was not sure I would even last the first day.  We walked out of the event last night with our next three most important steps to take in our lives and by when we would achieve them.  Here are mine:

I would get up this morning and before going to the computer and starting work I would do the following three things:

1.  Weigh and record my weight
2.  Exercise
3.  Eat a healthy breakfast.

Sounds pretty simple doesn’t it?  It was not and I did it anyway.  Being a perfectionist, it is easy to get sidetracked.  I answered the phone right before I was getting on the treadmill, thinking it was my husband and instead it was a business call.  The call lasted about 30 minutes or more and I kept thinking; I am supposed to be doing my three things before I do business and now I have already blown it.  Could not even get through the first day.  And then I said STOP IT!!!  Life is in session and you have to do the best you can do.  You are done with that call and now go do what you said you would do.  And I did and it felt good to make that choice.

Part of my plan is to record everything I eat and it took me awhile to find the program I use.  Part of my brain was saying this is taking too much time, you’ll remember just go check your email and then record it later.  I am so thankful I did not listen to that part of my brain.

As I was writing this, I had to keep fighting the urge to say “to be continued” and go work for a while.  And I didn’t.  So it is 9:53 on the first day of this plan and I have kept my commitment to myself.  Realizing if I were to drop dead of a heart attack, it would not matter how successful or unsuccessful my businesses are is an interesting concept.

I just am glad that as of this moment, I have followed my plan and made my health important to me today.

Going forward on the journey,

Judi

1. Your Time – lots of people think it is money and my belief is you can always get more money, you can never make up for lost time.

2. Your Contact List – the people you know and do business with, the ones who trust you, like you, know what you do, and would refer business to you.

These two are invaluable assets and it is so critical to know and appreciate that.  And today I was reminded also to be very grateful for the relationships you have built.

Time and the power of relationships are the foundation of what Team Women stands for.  In his book, Never Eat Alone, Keith Ferrazi’s definition of networking is “Connecting – sharing my knowledge and resources, time and energy, friends and associates and empathy and compassion in a continual effort to provide value to others, while coincidentally increasing my own.   Like business itself, a connector is not about managing transactions, but about managing relationships.”

Keith shares “Later in life, as I rubbed shoulders with business leaders, store owners, politicians and movers and shakers of all stripes, I started to gain a sense of how our country’s most successful people reach out to others and how they invite those people’s help in accomplishing their goals.  I learned that real networking was about finding ways to make other people more successful.  It was about working hard to give more than you get.”

The relationships you build truly are priceless and I had an amazing reminder of that in my own life in the last 24 hours.   Like most of us, I wear many different hats and explain it by saying – I have my fun business – I have my business which pays the bills and I have Team Women, which is my passion.  And one of my “intentions” this year is to successfully spend time growing and creating more success in each of them.

One of my goals this past weekend was to get all three monthly newsletters done for my three businesses.  I am blessed to be married to my wonderful husband Kevin, who the TW Staff lovingly calls Tech Support.  He provides all my fabulous graphic support in addition to working a full time day job.  So on weekends, we really have to crank it and crank we did this past Saturday and Sunday.  All day Saturday was spent preparing and publishing newsletter number one and it went out about 9 pm Saturday evening.

Sunday at 8 am we were back in the office working on newsletter number two and we completed it at 10:30 last night. Ok, we would have been done sooner, but we did take a Super Bowl break mid day.  Kevin was ready to go to bed and I just wanted to do one more thing which was to send this newsletter out, so I could start bright and early on the Team Women Newsletter this morning.   In retrospect, I just should have gone to bed and sent newsletter number two out this morning when I was not so tired.  I know I am a morning person and almost always take that into account.

So, when I selected the group to send the newsletter to, instead of clicking true I clicked false on the people to receive it.  Each time I publish a newsletter; there are a certain amount of return mails for bad email addresses etc and when those started to come in, I figured I may as well clean up some of these while I am up.  I started getting a funny feeling in my stomach when I saw the bounces were coming from people who I had not intended to get it.  How on earth did it get sent to them, when they did not have the right box checked in my contact management system?  By 1 am this morning I was sickeningly certain of what I had done wrong and was mortified.

In Team Women, we have a policy of focusing on one core profession and I had accidentally sent info to the wrong group of folks and was just sick about it.   I was embarrassed and so upset I knew I had to immediately send out an explanation and apology letter.  So at 2 am this morning, I am in waking Kevin up to come help me send out another email which he did. (He is a keeper!)   By the time I got to bed finally it was close to 3:30 and then I could not sleep.

When I woke this morning, I was afraid to turn on my computer because I thought people were going to be angry at me.  And here is a sample of what I found awaiting me in my inbox:

• No problem, I sure all of us had done this at one time or another. Get some rest.
• Hi Judy, No worries…I have 3 lists too and I know how it is.
• Dear Judy, Do not stress about this…it is okay? Thank you for the heads up.
• We all make mistakes. Please don’t worry - I did not take offense and if someone did, they need to get a life!
• Not a problem at all. Believe me, I wish there were a recall button on mail sent that you could pull back in 30 seconds or so. Actually, I think there is but maybe I just imagined it.
• Judi Don’t be so hard on yourself.  It was an innocent mistake.  Hopefully everyone is selective about what’s really important and this error was not a big deal.  I would not take it personally if someone was offended by it because he/she probably has other issues.
• Don’t worry about it, Judi?  It was good information anyway.  I didn’t snack during super bowl, except for an orange and I mostly worked and came out only to watch the Boss!
• Judi, No problem - accidents happen and when we are running on extra we have a few additional ones.
• No worries!!
• Not a problem! Not to worry!
• It does my heart good to know someone as accomplished and wonderful as you are makes the same goofy mistakes as I do sometimes.  I can’t imagine that ANYONE in Team Women is inconvenienced at all.   I’ve deleted my entire Team Women Blank mailing list THREE times now as I’ve tried to rearrange recipients.  What an idiot!  Can’t wait to see you next week.
• Not a problem.  I have done this once or twice in my career….
• I enjoyed the newsletter!  Hope you had a restful sleep.
• Don’t worry, Judi.  We all make mistakes.  Don’t beat yourself up and have a great week!

Yes, I have been crying very grateful tears this morning for the compassion, understanding and support I have received.  Yes, there were a few who asked to have their names deleted and were very nice about.

My point - When you belong to a chapter of Team Women, it is about a lot more than getting a referral at every meeting.  It is about forging powerful, loyal relationships to support you throughout your entire career.  All success begins by giving and coincidentally (as Keith says) your business will begin to grow also.

I am so thankful and abundantly grateful to be blessed by some many wonderful people in my life.  Thanks for being there.  And please let me know how I can support you.

Keep Networking,

Judi

I arrived in Hartford around 9 pm for a 10 am Team Women meeting the following morning.  And my bag could not get there until 5 pm the next day.  I have no makeup, no clean clothes, no nothing…. I tried to be a good sport since I was flying US Airways.  I said it could have been worse,  at least I landed on the runway and not the Hudson River.  So the next morning at 7:30 am I am in a cab trying to find a store where I can buy replacements for everything I was missing.   Thankfully, I was able to get almost everything.  I did forget Mousse so I am sure I had frizzy hair at the meeting.

BUT I did not have any of my food!!!  The night I arrived it was after 9 by the time I got to my hotel, it was snowing, and I did not have a car.  The hotel had a restaurant across the parking lot which did have room service.  So I ended up making the best choices I could and eating dinner at 10:30 pm.  This was not the way I had planned my eating to go on this trip.  When I was clothes shopping, I did pick up several large bottles of water.

Next stop was Dulles Airport in Washington, DC.  What was fun was I went from CT to VA via Orlando, Florida!  Don’t even ask.  So nine hours later when I arrived in DC, guess what - no bags again and they had no idea where they were.  Not to mention I had to pay an additional $90 for my bag in CT because it was overweight due to the shopping I had to do.   FYI - Southwest will immediately give you $50 to shop; US Airways just gave me a hard time.   Again my bag was not going to be delivered until the following day!  I was staying at a friend’s house and she had shopped for me and had lots of healthy stuff on hand.  So it was better than the stop in CT food wise.

Coming home was DC to Charlotte, NC to Phoenix and then on to OC.   And I have to admit, I was running out of my good attitude by this point.  US Airways charges $1.oo for coffee and $2.00 for juice and have no healthy food to buy at all.  When I was hassled by an airline person in AZ about not being able to take on both my purse and my laptop, I had reached my limit and was not very pleasant.  Suffice to say, I had my choice to board with only my purse or be escorted out of the airport by TSA.  I chose to come  home.

Why am I sharing all of this?  Because sometimes no matter how well you plan and all the good intentions you have, Life Happens!  I worked hard and made at least 80% of the right choices throughout all of this disarray, until Phoenix…  By the time I got to my seat, I was ready to cry and totally frustrated.  When I landed in OC, my phone was not working, so could not call for my car.  My bag was the last one to come off (should have been satisfied it was there) and it took forever to get my car.   My attitude was toast.

I chose at the beginning of the year to give up one food and that was french fries.  That was a commitment I made to myself.  Immediately after driving out of the airport, I drove through Del Taco and ordered fries.  Did it make me feel better - NO - it made me feel worse.  Was I getting back at the airlines for all of my hassles - No - I was only hurting myself.  Upon reflection, I think I just wanted to take control of something, anything in my life.  The lesson learned is to always do the best you can and not let the outside world make me turn against myself.

Do you have to be perfect to achieve a healthy weight?  No, you just have to keep on keeping on.   I am giving up French Fries again right now, right here and allowing myself to be at peace with making a mistake.  How can I support you in making more right choices?

Judi

P.S.  Don’t fly US Airways, if you can avoid it…

Followed shortly after by an email from one of my customers.  She was on week ten of P90X and only missed working out one day over the holidays!  All of her clothes are loose and she has muscle definition where there hadn’t been before.  And her concern was that she did not like the number on the scale.

I responded in my knowledgeable coachly fashion that if she looked thinner, had new muscles, and her clothes are baggy who cares about the scale?  Hmmm, notice how we teach what we need to learn most?

Then I had my call with my coach and shared all the positive changes I was making.  Hearing myself tell her about them, made me realize I was doing a lot of things right.  And instead of recording my weight daily, I decided to record what I am most proud of from the day before.  For example, we tried a great new vegetarian recipe last night and loved it.  Even though I was sure I was not full, I did not have seconds.  That was great for me…  She mentioned perhaps I needed to focus on the lifestyle changes I am making rather than .8 pounds one day.

The lesson which was reinforced for me in this was how important it is to have a coach.  We may “know” what we are doing and just not doing it.  Having a coach supporting us and pointing out the good is very helpful, not to mention it makes me accountable to someone other than me.  I have been called the “Queen of Rationalization.”

As a Beach Body customer, I am your coach for free.  Please use me!

“Looking and Feeling Fine in 2009 - Join Me!”

Will it be easy?  No!  Will it magically happen on its own?  Not a chance.  Can you do it?  ABSOLUTELY!  I am staking ‘my life’ on it.  If I do not reach a healthy weight, the chances for me to drop dead from a heart attack or stroke are great.  And I have a lot of life to live, people to meet, and places to go.  So 2009 I have declared to be the year of change for me.

My motto for the year is “Looking Fine and Feeling Fine in 2009 – Join Me!”  I invite everyone who has battled with weight and has given up or decided it is just not possible for them to come along for the journey.  Let’s help support and motivate and encourage each other.

This is Day 2 for me.  I had thought about waiting until today.  You know, New Year’s Day really is still part of the holiday.  Or waiting until Monday, January 5 as everyone knows you can only decide to lose weight on Mondays right? Then I asked myself how committed I was to regaining health and began yesterday.

Was yesterday perfect?  No and I am not looking for perfection.  I choose healthy foods all day and need to eat more frequently.   I need to reduce my portion sizes even though the food is healthy and I need to exercise.  I don’t like to exercise and that is okay, I know I have to do it anyway.  What is my choice?   I choose life!

Join Me….