Making a Meaningful Personal New Year’s Resolution

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions very often but this year, I thought it would be good for me to share what I’m resolving to do because I know some of you will hold me accountable!. New Year’s resolutions have sort of become the butt of jokes and it leads lots of psychologists to really look at resolutions. So I’m not sure how many of you do them but if you are thinking about it, here are a few articles I think you may find helpful if you are considering making a resolution:

• How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions: Advice from the Experts (Time.com) details five tips that are pithy to read but when you read the article, they have constructive information. The list includes: Don’t Kid Yourself, Quit Cold Turkey — Temporarily, Do What the Dalai Lama Would Do, Don’t Try to Scare Yourself Straight, and Get Better Friends. via Experts’ Advice on Keeping New Year’s Resolutions – TIME.
• Life: New Year’s Resolutions: Why They Don’t Stick (PsychologyToday.com) turns a critical eye on the things so if you’ve tried doing resolutions several times and not been able to follow through, you may want to diagnose why. These tips may help you figure out the issue.
• How to Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions: 10 Great Tips for Keeping Your Resolutions This Year (about.com) provides straightforward ways to do it with success as a goalpost. The 10 steps given here are:  Choose a Specific & Realistic Goal, Pick Just One Resolution, Don’t Wait Until New Year’s Eve, Start With Small Steps, Avoid Repeating Past Failures, Remember That Change Is a Process, Don’t Let Small Stumbles Bring You Down, Get Support from Your Friends and Family, Renew Your Motivation, and Keep Working on Your Goals.

So, back to this commitment I’m making… 2012 is going to be a year where I continue doing more for my health.

I have been lazy about a couple of things and have already started doing better. The area I’m focused on most is better understanding and plan my diet. I started working on this the end of October and despite the busy holiday meals, traveling a lot and the party season we are in, I’ve lost a little more than 10 pounds. Not a huge change, but definitely the right trend AND the nice thing is how some of my clothes fit. I’ve thought about doing this several times before but always found some sort of excuse to derail myself.

The biggest one being that I like food that tastes good even if it isn’t good for me! To help me get this done, I’ve done several things already:

• The move to St. Louis gave me a perfect opportunity to change habits. I realized creating new habits would be easier in a new place and started planning on this before I moved.
• I joined a WeightWatchers group that meets at our office and have started tracking what I eat through the system they have online.
• I’ve identified a couple of key things that need to change in my habits and started making changes.
• I’m eating breakfast first thing every day and they tend to be of yogurt and/or whole grains and fruit.
• Water is becoming my go to drink and I’m seeing a lot less Coke in my cup. One of the specific changes has been to virtually stop drinking Cokes with meals. (Yeah, I still do this on occasion, but not nearly as often.)
• The size portions I’m eating…. well I’ve been working on those a lot. Little things like when I grab the chips to go with my sandwich, the bag stays in the kitchen rather than tempting me to keep eating them til I’m stuffed.
• Fruit is being delivered to the office to be sure I have good, healthy snacks handy which helps me not turn to the easy choice of a candy bar in the machine.
• Thinking about what I eat at a given meal, on a given day and in a given week has me thinking a lot more about vegetables.
• Another fun part about doing this at work is there are several other folks who are doing WeightWatchers. And since my nieces and sisters have also been changing the way they eat, I’ve got some great support networks coming together.

Since I’ve made progress here on my food & nutrition, I want to make sure I step it up a bit more as we start 2012. And I feel I can go ahead and sign up up to keep making progress there, and that I should go ahead and look at a way to move ahead. That’s where doing more exercise comes in. For now, I’m going to try to do more exercise at home. I’ve got the stationary bike that has sat unused throughout the Memphis years…. I’ve used it a bit here. But I’m thinking something really fun like dancing could be the answer so I’ve gotten myself the X-Box 360 with the Kinect bar. Seems like indoor things will be best in the event winter strikes hard. I haven’t been home much to use the X-Box yet, but we played with my sister’s and I’m learning how it all works. We’ll see how this all goes. If you have any games you like particularly, please let me know.