Guest Blogger: Author Susan Meier of Team 6

Rules? Really? I’m Fifty-Something. Do I Still Need Rules?

Yes. LOL

A few years back, my family was having a picnic and I got into a discussion with a few of my nieces. One of them turned to me and said, “But your teeth are ridiculously white. Looking at you, I don’t think we have to worry about prematurely getting yellow teeth.”

I gasped. “My teeth are white,” I said, “Because I’m diligent about upkeep. Once a year I use a whitener. Then I use upkeep strips every couple of months.”

Thinking about that this morning as I was doing my every-couple-of-months teeth-whitening upkeep strip, it suddenly dawned on me that I had very near religious rules about keeping my teeth white and virtually no rules about how I ate.

Years ago, I was a huge Tony Robbins freak. You remember him? The Thirty-Days to Personal Power guy? I was a TR freak because the man was smart. He had real answers to problems like motivation and weight loss and figuring out who you are so you can be that person.

He did an entire tape section on Rules. He said that if you found someone who was ultra successful at something like maintaining his or her weight, or never being in debt, or … having white teeth, it was probably because they had rules that got and kept them there.

For instance, I have a hard and fast rule that I do not, ever, eat at night. (That is my one food rule.) Others tell me they get up in the middle of the night for a snack and I gasp. With as big as I am now, if I ate in the middle of the night, I’d be calling Omar the Tent Maker for my next conference wardrobe.

But I don’t eat at night. Ever. That’s a rule, baby. And that’s really what you need if you want to get weight off and keep it off. Rules. Real rules. Rules that you don’t break. Not for anyone or anything. Which means…they have to be realistic.

So as I was looking at my teeth, realizing some good habits and hard and fast rules had kept them in fairly decent shape, I started to wonder if I couldn’t make some more rules. Especially rules about my weight.

Not that I want to feel like I’m in a prison camp. But halfway decent rules like:

You should never eat more than two cookies in any given day.

Eat fruit as snacks.

 

Never heap a plate of anything.

Drink water. (Not soda or beer or even coffee sometimes)

NEVER go over the amount of calories you know you can use in a day.

Exercise EVERY DAY.

The more I thought about the rules, the more I believed I really could lose weight, not just lose it but keep it off, if I could just get the mindset I had with my teeth. “I need rules. They might be a pain in the butt, but having rules is the right thing to do, so I’m having rules and keeping them!”

Just think of society. If we didn’t have rules there would be anarchy. So why would your body be any different?

I have rules about how long I work every day. Rules about my teeth whitening. (Obviously…lol) So why not implement some rules for something that wouldn’t just make me feel better and prettier, but also something that would keep me healthy?

Think about yourself…What rules should you have?