Handcuffs and 50 Shades of Red

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Question: What is embarrassing, annoying and eye opening at the same time?

Answer: A uniformed police officer standing at your door with handcuffs.

If you’ve read or heard of the new pop novel 50 Shades of Grey, you may be thinking I am right on board.  The knock on my back door and as I peeked out the little viewing window and saw a police officer in full uniform standing on my stoop with his pad, I was nervous.  He asked, “Are you Rosie Battista?”,  to which I affirmed.

It wasn’t quite an invitation, it was more of a command as he offered me my options. He said, “pay the fine right now today or I’ll have to take you in by handcuffs”.  How many colors of red are there in the humiliation rainbow? When your mom and daughter are sitting at the table peering at you, during this kind of  episode, it’s not fun, it’s embarrassing.
Where am I going with this and what does it have to do with food and your body? In the naked sense it was a reality check, getting down to the naked truth and really examining what I was doing in my life. The officer came to my door because of a cracked windshield and a ticket/summons that I received because of that cracked windshield, which I ignored. (You could say I conveniently “forgot to pay”).

To back up a bit,  the crack began with a little tiny hole that if I had taken care of immediately would not have spread to the big crack that got me the ticket in the first place.  And if I had been fully engaged, I would have come home and immediately taken care of the summons by sending in a check.  That ticket sat and is still sitting in the bottom of my bag crushed under some other not so needed stuff floating around in that 10 pound purse I tote around.

Denying and ignoring something does not make it go away.  If you are in denial about what you are eating and ignoring the signs and symptoms your body is telling you when you are not feeling energetic, healthy and sexy, there will be a knock on your door of life (or on your head).  Perhaps you won’t get off as easy as I did with an $89 summons.  Perhaps it will be a disease or fat that will show up knocking instead.
The point of this story is to tell you that you can cover up and pretend “it” doesn’t exist but “it” won’t go away until you face “it” straight on and embrace “it”. That ticket rolled up in a ball at the bottom of my bag is still a ticket even if it’s not in my consciousness daily thought or out of sight.  And even though it’s out of my mind, it is still affecting my life because the court system is not forgetting about it.  Let’s equate that with your mission of weight loss.  Just because you forget about it, your overweight body is not going away if you don’t face it head on.

Just because I had all good intentions to pay the ticket, the ticket didn’t get paid without action on my part and the consequences showed up at my door in the form of a uniformed man.  If you have been intending to lose weight and start eating better but taken no action, that doesn’t count. I had every intention of paying that ticket, someday, but the cop didn’t care about that. If you have been starting every Monday morning with the intention to change, that doesn’t count.  If by Tuesday you are back to your old driving habits of showing up a fast food window, you are going to pay, and not just at the window, but with your very life.  Intentions only matter when action is taken along with it. If you intent to get healthy, you’ve got act.

If I had fixed my windshield and paid the ticket immediately I would have saved my wallet  $450 (between the new glass and the summons fines). I got off easy. The officer at my door was not so polite to me. Pay up or I take you in… and I am not going to be so nice to you either as I deliver this message. Pay up, in the form of getting your act together around your self care, or you will be taken in – maybe to a doctors office. You have opportunity here. Get your ticket out of the bottom of your bag and start to take care of your body.  You can save yourself doctor costs,  pharmaceutical costs and the emotional costs of getting sick.  If you are not walking around in your healthiest sexiest body,  you are driving around with a crack in your life and maybe not seeing and experiencing life as clearly as you could be.

I got an invitation to pay up the bail or be taken away in handcuffs. I invite you to get healthy and participate fully in the process of your life. It is not only your right but your obligation to take care of your one very precious self. When you do that, everyone benefits as you show up as the clearest, shiniest version of yourself and give your best to the world.