I don’t mean to brag but . . .
I finished my 14-day diet in
3 hours and 12 minutes.
Resolution: A firm decision to do or not to do something.
“My name is Kelly and I am a resolution-making failure.”
“HELLO KELLY!” Aha, good, I see I am not alone!
A few years back on January 1, I gave up sugar as a New Year’s resolution. Unfortunately, on January third I was found eating a tub of Ben and Jerry’s Fish Food . . . with a side of Christmas cookies. In fairness, I did feel I needed to rid the house of all temptation—easier to do it in one fell swoop! Another January, I joined a gym with a life-time membership, pledging to go five times a week. Yes, I still have the membership; no I haven’t been there in over ten months. But this past January I figured it out. Forget body, let’s work on the spirit—that’s something I can stick to! So I started the free twenty-one-day meditation recordings with Oprah and Deepak Chopra. Honestly, this meditation was so amazing, I mean it was literally life-transforming! Well, it was, at least for four of the twenty-one days that I actually listened to the recordings.
Ugh! New Year’s resolutions! If you are like me, you start January with a bang. You are doing everything you know you should be doing, you are journaling your reflections, juicing or blending your green smoothies, heading to the gym after work, and scheduling a calendar full of time with friends, family, and even date nights with your significant other. If you are also like me, by the tenth of January, you find yourself discouraged by the winter produce that’s available in your grocery store, so you begin exchanging green drinks at the farmers market for café lattes at Starbucks. By the twenty-first, you will probably deem that January offers an entirely unacceptable degree of coldness in the air (oh, yes, even people in Florida are known to do this) and find that instead of meeting up with friends for dinner, you would rather binge-watch episodes of Friends on Netflix (while also binging on a nice bowl of ice-cream). Sadly, by the beginning of February, your favorite spin or kick-boxing instructor has left your gym or yoga studio and the replacement instructor actually makes you viscerally angry because he/she doesn’t instruct the participants to do enough sit-ups (jeez!). Or worse, that new instructor expects you to do entirely too many sit-ups (is Mrs. Perfect Body kidding me?). This frustration allows you to believe that it is not only in your best interest that you skip class but also in the new instructor’s best interest that you forgo the class.
Is this what we have come to? Are we quitters? Are we often lazy, sometimes apathetic, ridiculously overwhelmed, and do we use these excuses to be quitters? Well, yeah, I guess I do. I see you smiling so I think you do, too. H
This year, my only resolution is to be resolute! If I take something on—like scheduling a space each month to organize—then I will stick with it. Being a serial “resolution failure,” you may ask how I plan on achieving this resoluteness. For me, it truly comes down to smaller goals. As good as a year membership at a gym looks, I know myself; I get bored or things change. I have recently taken up purchasing class cards on Groupon versus yearlong or lifetime memberships. This allows me to try things first. I can take the time to feel the vibe of the studio/gym and then choose my poison. (Yes, most often I view physical exercise as poison.) All kidding aside though, exercise is modern medicine and it will keep you healthy and strong. Yes, I know this for a fact. So rather than focusing on having the resolution to achieve six-pack abs by summer (which would be really awesome), make your goals smaller. Perhaps, just do enough core work to simply alleviate some of your back pain. Or maybe even smaller, surely we can carry more grocery bags in from the car each week, or carry a child (or puppy) for longer periods of time. Choosing the stairs over the elevator . . . that’s a classic, we know it! But are we doing it? This January I will! (And I hope you will, too).
Don’t want to place physical activity on your resolution list? I get it. What about the age-old “diet/eating healthy” resolution? Most of my Januarys have been spent tossing everything white (sugar, flour, etc.) into the garbage. February, I am back in the grocery store purchasing . . . you got it, sugar, flour, etc. Many health gurus swear by the brilliant idea of eating a diet that is 70 percent “whole food,” or food that is as close to its original state as possible. That seems manageable because it leaves 30 percent wiggle room for reality (reality is also known as sugar, flour, etc.).
Forgive yourself for the small failures and encourage yourself to continue on the path of greater health. The New Year always offers within it a form of forgiveness and a nice place to start over! Here is your new beginning. Your year is a 365-page book—write a good one!
Kelly Martinsen is author of A Year Of Inspired Living –Essays and Guided Journaling available at Amazon.com http://amzn.to/2spoepK
