Healthy Fast Food Restaurants

The title sounds like an oxymoron. Are there really any healthy fast food restaurants? Here's a Yahoo! article that discusses that very idea. For you to fully understand why this article interests me, I'll have to take you back a few years. Five years ago this Christmas, I stepped on the scales and my parents house and went 'whoa! Where did those extra pounds come from?' I spent the next three months playing around with exercising and cutting a few calories and pretty much got nowhere. In April, 2004, I bought a treadmill and got serious. And when I say I got serious, I mean I counted almost every calorie that went into my body. It became somewhat of an obsession to know how many calories were in everything I ate. Before my family would go out to a restaurant, I would look online to see how many calories were in each meal and decide what I could and would eat. At most sit down restaurants, I ate a chicken caesar with no cheese and dressing on the side. I cut out sweets, french fries, and, hold on to your seat, sweet tea from my diet. At meals, I would announce how many calories were in a serving of each item. I know how many calories are in a Blizzard from Dairy Queen (more than you imagine) and how many are in a Krispy Kreme donut (a lot but not as much as I would've imagined). Trust me, come dessert time, my family usually asked me to keep my caloric info to myself. For the most part, I think I obliged them. By the end of 2004, I had dropped a lot of weight and was in probably the best shape of my life. At the very least, I was in the best shape of my adult life.

Here's what I learned:

You definitely have to educate yourself. You can find healthy alternatives at any restaurant. You may have to dig for info. But there are good healthy options at any restaurant.

It costs more to eat healthy. That didn't surprise me. Buying fresh fruits and salads cost more than buying a frozen pizza or a double cheeseburger off the McDonald's value menu.

You have to be committed and intentional. When I was serious about dropping some pounds, I kept a goal in front of me the whole way. There were incremental goals but there was also one big goal along the way as well. I had to be intentional about the foods that I ate and how I ate them.

Why do I share this with you? Because during that time of my life, I saw parallels between my physical and my spiritual life. It's easy for us to get lazy and satisfied spiritually. We can become sedentary spiritually. How do we break out of a cycle that says, "I'll get started tomorrow?" First we have to realize that we need to break out of our spiritual doldrums. We have to step on the scale if you will and see where we are spiritually. Then we have to make a commitment, set a goal of where we want to be spiritually. Then we have to get active and involved. I laugh about the time between Christmas, 2003 and April 2004, because my idea of exercise was to walk two miles twice a week at a very leisurely pace. But getting started was the best thing that I could have done. It costs more to be committed spiritually. It will cost money, time, hobbies, possessions, etc. But it ALWAYS is better for you. Mark Batterson put it this way, "If we were to always act in our own self-interest, we would always obey God" no matter how much our logic, our intuition, or our own desire for self-preservation protests.

Step on the scales and let the Holy Spirit lead you into a spiritually active, fulfilling life.

-- Peace, Jamie