I also choose to LIVE!

I have never blogged before. This is my first time so I hope I do it right. I also have a new motto, thanks to Christine, it is "I choose to live". S0, I also want to blog about each day how I have made a conscious choice to LIVE!! I believe, as Christine stated, we will live, but what am I doing to LIVE, to take care of my body through eating healthy and exercising and I must add enjoying WHAT is around me: my kids, my husband, the beautiful world around me, and experiences that make me stronger because I did something that was hard or I did not want to do.

I want to post for yesterday first and then today so this will be a long blog. I am trying to, once a week, have a day of exercise that pushes me, or is different from the other work-out days. People who are training for a marathon or half a marathon run a normal run 3 days a week and then have one day of pushing themselves. I figure I may never run a marathon or half marathon but I can have one day where I do something different that I can feel good when I look back and say, "Today I biked 20 miles or today I ran for 6 miles or today I hiked up Hole in the Rock." You get what I mean. Yesterday was my day I chose to push myself. I biked 20 miles out on the country roads of Indiana. It was especially hard because the wind was blowing hard, so to be honest, the exercise part was not really that fun because it was so HARD. I want to tell you though about how beautiful it was. It was, amidst the hardness, one of the most majestic beautiful things as I biked over the hills, out in the middle of nowhere, seeing the beautiful trees, farms, an old cemetary and old church. I had never seen any of it before and it is just miles from my house. The trees with their changing leaves and the newly harvested fields. It was so quiet and peaceful I had to just turn off the little red machine for a while and enjoy the sound of beauty and quiet and peace. It gave me an opportunity to reflect on really what a beautiful place God has created for us and how lucky we are. I WAS LIVING!!!

Today was hard for me. I got on the elliptical to exercise but my knees were really hurting(from the bike ride I am sure) but I tried to push through the pain even at a slower rate and made it 40 minutes! That is how I chose to live today. I might also add, that though this may seem like a joke, I am actually very serious, I am right now trying to get over my cookie addiction. I am an emotional eater and when I am tired or have circumstances out of my control I eat COOKIES for comfort(which seams to be a daily occurance). The problem is I don't eat just one, I eat MANY and it is not healthy nor does it help me fit in my clothes no matter how hard I work out!!! So today, I have been craving cookies all afternoon and I chose to drink a sugar free hot chocolate instead. That is a poor supplement but I am choosing to LIVE and so this is what I am doing today to CHOOSE TO LIVE. I am picturing Frog and Toad working on WILL POWER, trying hard not to do something you really want to do or not do, by putting the cookies in a box, with a string tied around it, up on a high shelf. I can see why Toad got so mad when he took it down and fed it to the birds, I would have gone home and baked a cake too. It is hard enough to not have it, let a lone waste it by giving it to the birds and taking away my agency by elliminating the temptation all together. I will not be giving my cookies to the birds, which I may regret later, but for today I will just try NOT to eat them or make them. Tomorrow I may have the courage to give them to the birds.