At present I have a broken wrist
which causes the temporary loss of activities that I enjoy.

My injury is healing, which makes my situation temporary,
but all of us experience losses that are permanent.

Some of them are enormous losses, others are small.
People move away or die; relationships and jobs change;
children age, time passes and our own bodies begin wearing out;
favorite stores close; even favorite TV shows are canceled.

When we recognize we have lost something that was valuable to us,
and that it is gone forever, we feel sad.

When we can turn our thoughts to the future
and leave the past behind, 
we have accepted the loss and can get on with our lives.

Hope is the belief that things will get better.
Hope is the antidote to despair.

A positive way of looking at the losses in our lives
is that the loss helps us see more clearly the value of what we have lost.

When we suffer a loss, what remains after the loss
is the essence of that which we have lost.

If we have lost a person through death,
we have lost only the physical sense of that person.
What we will always have within us is the essence of that person.

Or if we have lost something that seems like a part of ourselves,
such as a job or a relationship, or a place etc.,
what remains within us
are all the experiences and memories that we gained
through that work, that relationship, or that location itself. 

Believing in oneself is simple to understand,
but is difficult to put into practice.

It takes a positive mindset to achieve in life,
and a belief that we can accomplish what we need to do.

To establish confidence that we can achieve our goals.
we sometimes need to ignore what others say.

Other people might tell us that we can’t achieve
a seemingly unreachable task or target.
But if we have belief in ourselves and have decided
to work on achieving a task, success can happen.

 Self-belief…even in times of great desperation…
is what gives us the confidence to put forth the effort
that is necessary to accomplish our goals.
The old fable below illustrates the point.

One day after a day of hard work a donkey was returning home from the field
and suddenly he slipped and fell into a deep well. The donkey started crying
and hearing his cry, the farmer came and tried to pull the donkey
out of the well.

However the donkey was too frightened to even try to climb out,
because he thought he might fall again while being pulled out of the well.
Finally, the exhausted farmer, decided to take his friends’ advice
to leave the donkey in the well and to close up the well
so there would be no more falling incidents.

 The donkey was sad when he heard them discussing the plan.
He had served the farmer for years, and now they were going to kill him
by closing the well. He lost all hope.

The farmer and his friends started throwing sand into the well
and when the sand started pouring on top of the donkey's body
the donkey realized he was about to die.
But the donkey then chose to use this hardship as an opportunity,
and started jumping over the sand each time it was thrown into the well.
As the sand piled up, the donkey rose to the top of the well
where he was able to climb out. This made everyone very happy.

The moral of this fable is that when the donkey believed in himself
enough to make the effort, he used his last opportunity to solve his problem.

Today is Mother's Day.
46 years ago, on Mother's Day, I gave birth to my first child.
This changed my life forever.
Motherhood does that for us all.

Each of us goes through Life Events that change us,
and that process continues all throughout each of our lives.

So whatever your life is at this moment...
...there will be changes.

Our Attitude about those changes is what will determine
how positive or negative any change is.

We can't stop Change,
but we CAN learn to develop a positive attitude about it.

Developing a positive mindset is a powerful life strategy.

I’ve found various positive thinking techniques to be useful.
Over time, small inspirational messages to myself, have helped me
to change the way I see the world around me,
and have helped me to Focus on those things in life that I find important and valuable.

Our words and statements about the events in our lives have a great deal of power.
The positive builds us up, heals us, and brings us joy,
while the negative
does the opposite.

Life contains both the negative and the positive.
However very few things in life are totally positive or totally negative.
Each involve personal value judgments rather than essential Truths.

I’ve learned that my own personal happiness is determined
by how much Focus I place on the positives.

 My current injury is putting this philosophy to a daily test. 

However I have frequently experienced that I  have the ability
to make myself happy through my own thoughts and behaviors.

I have been using DietPower for the past 6 1/2 years,
and I have logged in all of my food every day
during that period...ie. 2409 days.
I intend to continue using it for the rest of my life.

  During my first 16 months of DietPower use,
I lost from 190 lbs down to my goal of 115.
I have been working to maintain at or near that weight
during the 5 plus years since then.

During that time I've used a great many different diets and food plans,
but always continuing logging all my food into DietPower every day
no matter what that food plan was.
Even all my VERY HIGH-CALORIE were always logged.
I consider myself a 100% success with DietPower.
This is a Habit that proves very useful at times like now,
when my normal routine has been disturbed by an injury.
I don’t feel very well, and I have had a few higher calorie days,
but tracking my food gives me a feeling of stability, and the hope
that soon things will adjust, and I will be able to establish
a new normal, during my recovery period.