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Happy New Year’s!
I was never one for New Year’s celebrating, it always seemed a bit depressing to me. It’s still not my favorite holiday and I celebrate it long enough to watch the ball drop in Times Square, listen to Frank Sinatra singing “New York, New York” and am in bed before the commercial break.
That being said, I have embraced parts of it. Despite it really just being the start of writing the wrong year for a few weeks, I’ve started to see it as a time to start fresh, embrace the motivation that comes out of the woodwork and make some plans to make the year a great one. Of course, like millions, losing weight was at the top of the list, year after year. And year after year, that failed miserably.
In my 30s I started writing down goals, not just weight related – things I wanted to work on, things I wanted to do that year and kept the list pinned inside a closet door. I make sure not to place undue pressure to be able to cross everything off. It’s just kind of a to-do list. Every New Year’s Eve, I burn the list, symbolically letting it all go, and hang a new one. Sometimes I carry items over year to year, sometimes the undone ones fall off when I decide they’re not longer important.
As for the weight loss, it was on my list for 2013 and for the first time in my life, I kept it and am still keeping it. I actually started working on that on January 2nd, today is Day 2195 with logging food on My Fitness Pal and making changes to my eating and exercise routines and keeping off over 100 pounds. On my profile page, I’ve listed my goals for each year, it’s a great way to look back and see how far I’ve come along in this journey. 2014 included goals like hitting Onederland, running a mile in under 10 minutes and hitting 10,000 steps each day. Those are now a routine part of my life. 2015 had me trying just one 5:45AM gym class and I remember it took me until October to actually get out of bed and do it. It was a cycling class and it was so hard to get up and go. Now 5:45AM classes/workouts are my norm Monday-Friday.
For 2019 my goals are mostly similar to 2018 – hit my goal weight of 138 lbs. but at the same time shift the focus to fitness, not weight loss. Lose the reliance on the scale, get my body fat down to 20-22% (currently 23.9%), add muscle, work on doing a pull up (my trainer thinks this is the year, we’ll see …), and incorporate more yoga/mindfulness into my life. There are a few more and not all of them are related to fitness but these the main ones. I started this morning at a yoga class – so far, so good. The instructors had us turning our clasped thumbs into an open book and talked about the blank pages we can fill in the year ahead. I loved that.
I know that come December 31st 2019, I’ll be happy with what I was able to accomplish and will be writing down new ideas for 2020. It’s going to be a good year.