What The Plan?

Any one who has ever ridden in a car with me knows that my pet peeve is people who don’t use their turn signals. Not that the driver ahead of me can hear what I’m saying, but I usually scream something like, “Turn signals are not an optional item on cars for a reason.”

It is not that the person who was just too lazy or inconsiderate to let the rest of the world know where they going that really bothers me, well a little of that, but I am a person who likes to know the plan. Not just my plan, but the plan of the perfect stranger who is driving in front of me too.

I recognize that this might be genetic, “the planning gene” because I have birthed a planner. One of Carter’s early multi-word sentences was, “What’s the plan?” And if I had kept statistics on everything she has ever said in her 13 years, “What’s the plan?” could easily be in the top three most repeated phrases right behind, “What’s for breakfast?” and “What’s for dinner?”

When I had my first job out of college selling mail opening and extracting machines I had a boss who used to say, “Fail to plan and you plan to fail.” He never gave Benjamin Franklin the credit for the original quote, “Failing to prepare, is preparing to fail.”

That boss was not teaching me anything I didn’t already know. I love planning. I love lists. I love them even more now that my middle-age brain can’t remember what I was looking for that made me go to the garage.

Dieting for someone who loves food as much as I do is really all about planning and sticking to the plan. Even if you are a planner, being someone who follows a plan is a whole other animal.

So here are a few of the things I do to plan my work and work my plan. First I eat the same thing for breakfast 99% of the time. This way I don’t have to think about it when I get up. I know that I am going to have 3/4 of a cup of High Protein Special K with a 1/2 a cup of skim milk and 3/4 of a cup of berries. See, there is variety, it could be raspberries, the top choice, black, blue or strawberries, or perhaps even a sliced peach, which for this exercise I will call a peach-berry. My friend Jan, whom I am visiting right now, even knows this and bought my cereal before I arrived.

The second tip is that I always look at restaurant menus online before I go. It is much easier to plan my whole days meals if I have an idea what I am going to order and not be tempted by a special at the last minute. Now, I have been known to chose a really good special as long as it is healthier than my previous choice.

I also plan my exercise and have a commitment to go to my trainer with a friend. Knowing that she is planning on me being there with her helps me keep my commitment.

Whatever you are trying to accomplish start with a plan. Eleanor Roosevelt put is simply, “It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.”