Christmas Dieting Guidelines

Ten Essential Steps to Ensure Your Pants Still Fit After Christmas:

1. If you eat something and no one sees you eat it, it has no calories.

2. If you drink a diet soda with a chocolate bar, the calories in the chocolate bar are cancelled out by the diet soda.

3. When you eat with someone else, calories don't count if you do not eat more than they do. This also includes, anything consumed from someone else's plate. It has no calories since the calories rightfully belong to the other person and will cling to his/her plate. (We all know how calories like to cling!)

4. Foods used for medicinal purposes NEVER count, such as hot chocolate, cream of chicken soup, and Sara Lee Cheesecake.

5. Movie related foods do not have additional calories because they are part of the entertainment package and not part of one's personal fuel. Examples: Milk Duds, M and M’s, Gob Stoppers, Tootsie Rolls and Red Licorice.

6. While whole cookies are fattening, cookie pieces contain no calories. The process of breaking the cookie causes calorie leakage making them suitable for guilt free consumption.

7. Things licked off knives and spoons have no calories but only if you are in the process of preparing something for someone else to eat.

8. Foods that have the same color have the same number of calories. Examples: Spinach and pistachio ice cream; mushrooms and mashed potatoes. And since chocolate is a universal color it may be substituted with any other food color.

9. Anything consumed while standing has no calories. This is due to gravitational pull theory combined with the density of caloric mass plus a whole lot of serious wishing it was true.

10. And finally, remember to always feed your friends. If you surround yourself with larger people, you’re sure to look a lot thinner.

This diet has never really worked for me but I sure do enjoy living by it's guidelines. (Has anyone seen my post-Christmas pants with the elastic waste?)

just thinkling

The Elliott Holiday Diet

The Holiday Diet For Those
Who Are Stressed

If you are stressed out over the holidays,
the following diet is designed to help you cope.

Breakfast:
1/2 grapefruit
1 slice whole wheat toast
8 oz. skim milk

Lunch:
4 oz. lean broiled chicken breast
1 cup steamed spinach
1 cup herb tea
1 Oreo cookie

Mid-Afternoon snack:
The rest of the Oreos in the package,
2 pints Rocky Road ice cream, nuts, cherries and whipped cream
1 jar hot fudge sauce

Dinner:
2 loaves garlic bread
4 cans or 1 large pitcher Coke
1 large sausage, mushroom and cheese pizza
3 Snickers bars

Late Evening News:
Entire frozen Sara Lee cheesecake (eaten directly from freezer)

Dreaming

I’m dreaming of a white Christmas … Christmas might be more than dreams but its not less than dreams.

You see her at a light: a young, hard looking woman with her haired pulled back in a convenient pony tail, two kids in car seats and the window rolled down part way to let the cigarette smoke drift out. And from her rear view mirror hangs a “dream catcher” … the circle shaped frame crisscrossed with leather cords, feathers dangling off the bottom rung. It doesn't matter that you don’t know her: because you’ve met her: an anonymous life in a world of need. Single and abandoned with toddlers, she could stand to catch a dream.

And you know him too. He swings out the door of his F150 pick up, his pants and his cowboy buckle not quite enough to restrain the belly that folds over his belt. He’s got a dream catcher in his truck too. He’s been trying to catch a dream forever it seems. And time keeps sliding by.

The Christmas story is littered with dreams. Joseph. The Wise Men. Elizabeth. Dreams that did not have to be caught. Dreams that were simply given by God. Dreams that changed how we came to understand God and what He is up to in this world.

Still, in this world, we see lot’s of folks hoping to catch a dream. Maybe any kind of dream would do. Anything other than what they experience every day...what they are living with every day. But most seem to helplessly, hopelessly chase dreams rather than catch them. Most end up with dream catchers dangling from a rear view mirror, hoping for the best. And all they catch is a dream catcher.

So maybe that’s part of the reason God simply gives dreams. He uses dreams to communicate in the original Christmas story because He is a dream giver not simply Someone who throws a dream out there to be caught at random in a dream catcher. Maybe He knows more about the people are hoping to catch a dream than they can even guess. Mabye they need to know He loves them and has a dream for their life that they cannot imagine possible.

And maybe our task is simply to give such people the dream God would have them catch: someone who loves them no matter how broken they seem ... how disappointed they are ... how they are hoping against hope that life can be different for them. Maybe.

…just thinkling