Day 15 of a 28-day program: a 5-mile run starts the day, a car belt breaks and gets fixed, diet soda drops to one per day, and a low-carb chicken cordon bleu recipe replaces flour with cornstarch. The speaker focuses on morning routines, cutting news, and choosing his mindset over setbacks.
Chapters
Feel really good this morning. It's just before 7 o'clock. Got my 5-mile run in already. Grant, I think, went 7.5. Feel good because I'm back on track. Monday morning, it's a great time to get things started again if you've fallen off the tracks a little bit. We're gonna get to the club before 8 o'clock. We're gonna have everything done today. Gonna be able to eat on our diet plan. Because I'm prepared for that. Just a real good start to the week. Feel great about it. Wrapping up my workout here. As I'm walking out, I'm seeing the other people that are here, and it's a lot fewer than normal. That's because we're earlier, and everybody has a morning routine. They just don't know it. So a lot of them don't know it, but a lot of people have a morning routine that they've thought about that is designed to get them the results they're looking for. And those are the people that I'm gonna start following. People that have that routine that is gonna get them to the destination they've had planned, and they're not gonna let anything get in the way. And they're gonna have that routine, they're gonna follow it, and when they skip a day or when they miss a day, they're gonna get right back on track. I wanted to expand a little bit on that thought of a morning routine because a lot of people say, "Well, I'm not a morning person," and that's fine, and they have an afternoon routine. But everyone does have a morning routine regardless of what it is. For me, I want to make sure that I get the day going, and I want to make sure that I can't have things during the day that get me off track. Oh, there's, there's Grant. He's on track. But that's the whole reason why I like an early morning start and get things going first thing, so that I don't have the things that crop up during the day that are going to throw me off course. It's all about my priorities and the way I want to have my life turn out, and that's just what works for me. I have had two life life-changing experiences before 9 o'clock this morning. The first one is this. You know that buff thing that you bought me like 3 years ago in the shower that you're supposed to put your soap on and then scrub instead of using a— that thing's awesome. It's really awesome with the lemongrass spearmint soap. That is just— that's life-changing. It's life-changing. I feel invigorated. The other thing is, this is even bigger though, when you've deprived yourself of white bread and then you have that cloud bread that we made a couple days ago with sausages for— gosh, that was like, that was almost like sex. I mean, it was so good. It was unbelievable. So I woke up this morning and I've come to the terrible realization that there's just not enough me in this world. To share with everyone. And that deprives so many people of the glorious blessing that is me. Sometimes it happens that things are going your way and everything's going great, and then all of a sudden something goes wrong or something goes that you didn't have planned. I got in the vehicle today and started doing the route, and I hear a noise that I'm really not comfortable with. We had a problem with this vehicle a couple of months ago, and it was belt-driven, and now I'm hearing belts squeal again, and I just don't want to take a chance of getting out on the route and making a small problem a much bigger problem. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get this checked out. I'll take it to the dealership and have them look at it. Meanwhile, I'll borrow one of the other vehicles that's stationary right now because one of our employees is working in the, uh, in one of our medical facilities. And we'll still get our route done, get our vehicle checked out, but we won't make the mistake of taking something small that's a problem and turning it into something a big is the problem. So a little bit of delay. Got my van now and got the other car to the shop. They're taking a look at it, make sure that I don't have too big a delay for a small problem. Tackle those small problems right away, and then that way you're sure you won't have big problems. It's bitterly cold out here today, but we're gonna get it done either way. As I think of things that I've done that will help you, they helped me, this is a great forum so I'm able to just record them right away and I don't lose those thoughts. And Something came to mind earlier today. I didn't have the opportunity to record it because it actually happened in the shower, but what I realized was that one of the things that I did a while back that have really made a difference in my life has helped me to be able to concentrate on the things that are important is I eliminated all newscasts. We eliminated television altogether in our home. Just one of those things that was right for us. It isn't right for everyone, but I don't listen to news talk anymore. I used to just live on talk radio. I don't listen to that anymore. I don't listen to any of the newscasts anymore. About 95% of what's on those is never going to affect my life, and the 5% that does, believe me, my friends, my family, and other people are going to inform me about it, and I make a rational decision as opposed to an emotional one because I've discovered that all of those newscasts, every bit of the media, is designed to keep you excited and energized and irritated to some extent about the things that matter to you, and yet they don't ever have solutions for them. They only have the ability to keep you angry and frustrated, and an angry and frustrated person is never going to achieve the goals that they're looking for. Anger is a great motivator in the short term, but it's a bad long-term plan. I've come to realize that momentum has a lot to do with pretty much everything, and it's good momentum or bad momentum. This morning, woke up Things were going great, and then all of a sudden had a little bit of a vehicle problem. That delayed us, and then I realized that I still had to go back to the house and pick up some things and just got a late start, which of course that wasn't good. And then the vehicle not being functional, that wasn't good. And now I just got a call saying that it's going to be almost $500 to fix the car, and that's not good. It would be really easy to just kind of get into a not good frame of mind, but I'm not going to let it happen. I had a great start this morning. I'm going to continue to have a great day. You can even add in, if you want to talk about the negatives, because I want to get them all out of the way now, but today's President's Day, which you wouldn't think would be a big deal on our business, but we're seeing that we don't have— we probably have about 60% of what we normally pick up on a Monday, and Monday's our biggest day picking up. So all of those things put together, you could get into a bad frame of mind. Not gonna let it happen because we're gonna be successful. We're gonna do the things we want to do. We're gonna focus on the things that we can control. We're gonna be positive in the things that are going on, and we're gonna focus on those things as well. I just realized another thing that I changed that I think has had an impact on my weight loss, and that is that I have limited myself to one diet soda a day, and I really haven't had that many of those. I've occasionally— I'll be in the store, I'll be walking by one. Truth is, I was probably off diet soda completely for the first 3 or 4 months of my weight loss campaign, and then just recently I've decided that it's okay to have one a day. But no more than one a day. Reason I think the diet soda thing's important is because I realized that I replaced drinking water with diet soda, and now that I don't have those diet sodas, I am actually drinking a lot more water than I did before, and I'm certain that drinking a lot of water has something to do with my weight loss as well. One of the best things about owning your own business is you can make things that are a priority a part of your day, and so I get to sit down daily with my family and have lunch and take a little bit of a break before we start the afternoon. Crazy weather we're having this afternoon. It's warm enough to be out in shorts and a t-shirt. It's very overcast, as you can see, and the wind's blowing, but a pleasant day. We're out for our afternoon walk, about a mile, mile and a half, spend some time together, catch up on what happened all day, and just get some extra exercise in. Trying a new recipe tonight. It calls for— it's a chicken cordon bleu casserole. Taken a rotisserie chicken and I've deboned it and chopped it up. Chopped up some ham. So let's put some Swiss cheese on top and I'll give you the rest of the recipe as I go. I've layered in my Swiss cheese. It's really thin-cut Swiss cheese. Now I'm about to make my sauce. Well, as usual, I'm gonna have to ad lib on this recipe. The sauce calls for 2 or 3 tablespoons of flour and 3 tablespoons of butter and then milk, and that's how you thicken the sauce. And I I don't have any flour because we try not to keep flour in the house, so I'm going to try to thicken it using cornstarch and just use milk, butter, and some cornstarch and some milk, see if I can thicken it up. Then I'm going to add some lemon and some Dijon mustard. There it is. And some paprika, which I don't have out yet. I have no idea if my sauce is right or wrong. It's got a little bit of a lemony Dijon mustard flavor to it. I I guess when you mix everything together it'll be good. I'm supposed to now pour it over the entire casserole and then put a topping on it. To reduce the recipe, I also reduced the cooking time. It's supposed to be 45 minutes. I lowered it down to 30. It always says just hot and bubbly, and clearly it's doing that. So let's see how this tastes. Here we have the finished product. Now I know that the panko is a little bit of a worrisome thing, but I cut it back to half of what it said I should have. So that combined with the ham and the Swiss cheese, the entire casserole had about, about 30 carbs, and this is about a quarter of the entire casserole, so that'd be about 8 or 10 carbs for the meal. Not even 10, 8 carbs for the meal, so I don't feel too bad about that. Monday evening, day 15, 28 days, and we're on the other side of the halfway point. Had a good day today, a really good day today, but not for the reasons that I thought I would. I feel really good about getting back on track this morning and just kind of focusing on my, on my priorities and on my routine. I got back to running and I got back to getting to the club and exercising, got all of that done early, got back on track with my diet and didn't fall off of that today. But the real thing that I learned, and that that's what this whole thing is, is a learning experience. I learned today that something I already knew: I really can control how I feel about things, and that's going to determine how my day goes. I had a couple of things happen today, I've mentioned them already, that really could have thrown me off. I was on a, on a roll for a good day and then had a lot of things right in a row happen that were bad, and I could have let that get to me. I could have let that determine how I was going to deal with the day, but I chose not to. I chose just to focus on the positive and focus on all the good things that were happening. And believe me, I don't have $500 laying around that I can fix a car with, but I was able to get through that too. And I'm fortunate enough to be able to handle a problem like that. So all in all, it was a great day. I learned so much because I just kept focusing on what I wanted to have happen, and I didn't let those those things that went wrong bother me too much. And one of the things I did to do that was I started thinking about all the successes I've had during this process, and I mentioned a couple of those today in the video. So that wraps it up for day 15. Tomorrow we're going to be up early. I know it's raining right now, but all of this is going to clear out and it's going to be cool in the morning. We're going to get up and do probably a 10K and hopefully get to the club first thing as well. So that's it, day 15, 28 days.
