NOTE: Please remember to check back in tomorrow when my 18 year-old daughter will once again guest post as she did yesterday. It is a piece she posted on her Facebook page about two special babies, Renee Swope’s Aster and the Babe in the manger. Stop by. I think reading it will give your Christmas a fresh perspective.

Welcome Weight Loss Wednesday gals! (If you are just happening upon this site  and want to join us on Weight Loss Wednesdays, click here to get caught up or simply leave a comment today. We’d love to have you!!)

Well, it is here.

The most tempting time of the year for a girl trying to watch her weight.

Christmas.

What will you face the rest of this week? What have you already faced?

I have been taunted by cookies and peppermint mocha lattes and fudge with walnuts and homemade fruitcake (no… I am not kidding. I am hired each year to make two of them for a friend, and my recipe makes three large loaves, so we keep one. It actually tastes wonderful!)

Ahead of me I have coming: honey ham with homemade sweet mustard sauce and cheesy potatoes and from-scratch rolls with butter; creamy eggnog and black forest cake and peanut butter buckeyes; my stocking will most likely sport dark chocolate from my family; my mom will get me some sweet goodies too as she does every year and she’ll make the most wonderful, traditional foods when we go to her house on Sunday. Neighbors are bringing us plates of treats; friends deliver dishes of candy and nuts.

Temptation is around every corner and staring me straight in the face.

So how can we conquer Christmas and its array of temptations? What will be our eating plan for the next week and a half?  I see three choices to ponder:

• We could simply give up and not even try. After all, we could always just heartily enjoy the many seasonal treats any time we want this next week or so, not worry if a pound or two (or more) are gained and then hit the restart button after the first of the year.
• Or, we can opt to sample the goodies in a sensible and occasional manner, savoring them slowly and hope to just maintain our current weight and not gain or lose.
• Or we can grit our teeth, stick with the celery sticks and raw carrots and try to drop weight as if it were any other week on our corporate weight loss Wednesday journey. You know, ignoring those Christmas treats.

I’m choosing option number two. After a 2.1 pound loss this week, I feel I have a little wiggle room. So I am going to attempt to enjoy only my most favorite and looked-forward to treats and practice less and less often.

What will you do?

And how did your week go!  How are you feeling? How are your clothes fitting? Seeing any reflection in your eating obedience in the scales? Want to throw your scale out the window? Need to hit the “restart” button?

Do tell! We want to know!!!

(P.S. I haven’t decided for sure how long, but after tomorrow, I will be taking a blogging break. I want to focus solely on Kenz and the boys while she is home and Todd has a birthday next Wednesday. So I may not post a WLW piece that day if I decide to take the entire week off. But we will be back at it on January 6th!)

Praying for you!!!!