I mentioned in my last post that I wanted to talk more at length about resolutions/goals/areas of improvement for 2012 in a separate post, so here we are!
So a couple of months ago, Maggie mentioned Health Month as a good way of accomplishing health goals. And I liked the idea, so I signed up for it in November. During November, I made three goals: take a vitamin every day, eat leafy/green/healthy vegetables 6 days a week, and write here every day. I succeeded at all 3 of them, though there were times when I creatively defined “day” in making sure to take a vitamin. And it was awesome. I’ve wanted to establish a habit of taking a vitamin forever — I managed it while pregnant, but never else, and I’m on the low end of iron levels so it’s a good idea. I even HAVE vitamins, I just don’t take them. Except now I mostly do!
For December, I picked three slightly harder things: drinking 8 glasses of water a day, reading a book every day, and tracking my calories. I’m not sure I succeeded as well as those things, partially because of the holidays and general busy calendar that comes along with it, and partially because I didn’t pick things with any leeway, so missing one day seemed to derail the whole process. For 2012, I’m going to focus on small things, one at a time. I also have non-health related goals, but I’ll detail those below in the general plan.
So, my general plan for 2012 is:
1) Do Health Month each month. Pick 3 small, positive things to emphasize. Pick goals that are attainable and habits that I want to add, then maybe think if there are habits I want to break. My long term goal is to lose about 25 more pounds and then focus only on maintaining strength, but I’m also totally uninterested in losing weight through gimmicks and nonsustainable lifestyle practices. Food-wise, my long term goals are to eat more protein and vegetables, less carbs and sweets. Exercise wise, my long term goals are to do yoga and bike, and walk/run outside as much as possible. Oh, and get enough sleep. That’s it, really. I don’t want to run a marathon, I don’t want to do 100 pullups — I would just like to walk up five flights of stairs without feeling like my lungs are going to strangle me at the end.
For January, I am going to: 1) eat a fruit and vegetable 6 days a week; 2) bring my lunch to work 4 days per week; 3) do yoga or other exercise 2x per week). Will check in in February to see how that goes.
2) Read more. Last year, according to GoodReads, I read 58 Books and 19825 pages (this doesn’t include today, but I’ll add that in 2012 anyways when I finish the book I’m reading). I think my goal for 2012 is 30,000 pages in at least 50 books, because I want to emphasize reading longer and more difficult books and not just reading as many romance novels.
Side note: in the 5th grade I was the book champion for the MS Readathon in the “books read” category. I read 153 books in the 12 weeks we had to read during the program. I raised almost no money because I wasn’t interested in that part, just the reading. I ended up reading crazy short and lame books at the end just to up my totals. This is the kind of thing I would like to avoid in my “read more” goal.
3) Find a yoga class that I can attend sustainably about once a week. I have a couple of yoga coupons and I’ve found a couple of classes I really like, but I want to finish the coupons I have and find a class I can attend once a week at a time that works with a class I like.
4) Put myself on a spending diet. We spend too much money in the following two categories: food (esp. restaurants) and random shopping. I am going to try to limit those things this year. I haven’t decided if I want to be more forced about it than that, but I’m going to start by being more mindful of the money I’m spending vis-a-vis the student loans I could be paying off. I also want to eat all the food in the house and start clearing cupboards and using stuff up so that when we hopefully move in August it won’t be such a pain.
That’s it. (I mean, it’s ONLY MONEY AND HEALTH, no biggie.) I’m hopeful I can do it.
