Jan 7 - I did it!

I feel a little like my granddaughter ... "I did it" ... we don't always know what she did, but she is very insistent! Well, I did it!  I had lunch out yesterday and the scale still reported a loss. Today it tells me 230.6.

Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend. I have said before, I use lunches as my way to keep up with friends and socialize, now that I am retired. So I HAD to find some way to eat out and stay healthy. To top it off, this first foray into the land of prepared food was to Bravo, and Italian restaurant, and one of the few places I enjoy eating Italian food out (I am a little spoiled by my grandmother's recipies!). Additionally, my lunch partner was running late. So there I sat, with hot bread and olive oil in front of me, reading a menu full of yummy pasta dishes ... what a recipe for disaster!

But no!! I managed to pass on the bread ... not even a nibble. And ordered a chopped salad with chicken breast. Their dressing is already a nice vinaigrette and they don't overload the salad with it, so I didn't bother asking for the dressing on the side. That and copious quantities of diet Dr. Pepper was my lunch. I left feeling full, happy, and victorious.

THIS is how I want to "diet" ... my making natural changes in my diet (i.e., what I eat), rather than limiting myself to something that I will abandon as soon as I lose weight. I never felt like I was eating "weird" while at lunch, had a great time, and my lunch companion even ordered the same thing ... tho' she did partake of the bread, but only sparingly.

SUCCESS all the way around.

I also made it to my second mailbox on my walk yesterday. I have found out how to (correctly) get Endomondo to post to Facebook, so my consistency (or lack thereof) is public.

I am listening to "What Would Google Do" by Jeff Jarvis. It contains some interesting ideas, especially as I try to expand my reach through blogging and social media. An idea I picked up yesterday was that successful "new economy" companies focus first on expanding their user (not customer) base, then figure out how to make money. Apparently this is mostly done with venture capital until the user base becomes large enough to monetize. But how does that work for those of us who are solo'ing it? He uses Craig Newmark, the founder of craigslist.org as his example.We independents, without access to up front capital, still have to eat and pay our bills. So we must have an additional source of income ... either a "day job" or living at home with mom and dad. But the point is, organizations who try to capture customers first, and keep them for themselves, are doomed in the new networked economy. Build your connections as large as possible, by aggregating or giving away content, providing search results for a focused niche, and link, link, link.

So you may see more links from my blogs and FB postings from now on. It's a brave new world after all!