Here's what I learned this weekend....

This weekend, like people all over my county and state, I was without power.  From sometime Friday night until sometime late Sunday afternoon, there was no electricity to be had.   I talk about mindfulness a lot.  You would think I would be better at being mindful, being grateful for things than this weekend proved me to be.  Here are a couple of the things I learned:

• The prospect of taking my clothes to the laundromat strikes fear into my heart.
• No matter how many times I go into the bathroom and flip the light switch, if the power is out, it still won't turn on.
• You can't make any kind of lunch if you a) can't open the refrigerator door and b) can't use the electric stove.
• It's not much fun to eat when your choices are coming out of a can and can't be warmed up.

I can't stress it enough -- it wasn't fun to eat.  Yes...we did get take out (and that was a thousand times better than something cold and out of a can) but my snacking was seriously cut down.  There was so much awareness of not being able to look into the fridge to see if I could some up with something fun to eat because every time I felt myself starting to head into the kitchen, the voice in my head said there wasn't really any point.  Seriously....how much do I really graze???

But the other interesting thing is that I didn't starve to death.  I ate much less this weekend than I have in weekends past and I was more active outside (there wasn't any TV to watch or computer to play on) -- so I'm sure I burned more calories than some other weekends -- but I didn't get significantly more hungry. 

Most all of us could do with eating less than we do.  Maybe we don't want to -- but we could -- and we would be just fine.  Put your kitchen off limits for a period of time and see how you adjust.  Notice that as you practice not going in there, it becomes just another habit -- it happened pretty quick for me  -- just a couple days without power.