Setbacks, New Years Resolutions, and other crap

Posted January 2nd, 2009 by Jeff J. Snider

I hate New Years Resolutions.  A few reasons:

1. If you know in December that you will have a particular New Years Resolution (like, say, for instance, losing weight), it makes it really easy to spend the holiday season rationalizing and living it up.
2. It has basically become a cliche to be good at your New Years Resolutions for a week or a month or whatever, and then throw it out the window.  It’s almost as if the best way to guarantee you WON’T do something is to set a New Years Resolution to do it.
3. New Years Resolutions rarely have the specificity necessary to give even a chance of success.  They are generally things like, “Lose weight,” or “Read more,” or “Be a better mom,” or whatever.  Those are really nice desires, but unless there’s a plan involved, they just ain’t gonna happen.

Unfortunately, I fell into the trap in number 1.  I ate way too much over the Christmas season, and I gained weight.  This is the first significant weight gain I’ve had since I started, and I plan to do everything I can to ensure that it is the last.  To help me avoid the problems in 2 and 3, I will not be setting New Years Resolutions this year.  But I will be doing something better: setting New Years Goals, along with a plan of action for achieving each one.

Here on this blog, I will only focus on one of my goals: get down to 240 pounds.  With my sub-goal of losing three pounds a week, I plan to achieve this goal in 2009, probably around early- or mid-fall.  What are the steps I will take to get there?  I’m glad I pretended you asked…

1. I will weigh in every Saturday morning (no more or less often), and I will report my progress here on the blog every week.  I’ve been weighing myself almost every morning, and I think looking at things too closely has been a detriment.  If I lost a pound or two the previous day, I get complacent.  If I gained a pound or two, I get frustrated.  Either way, it will be more effective for me to weigh in only once a week, where any gain or loss will be more real.
2. I will exercise in some form every day except Sundays when it is too cold to walk to church.  At least five times a week, I will do a workout of 30 minutes or more.  We have many thousands of dollars worth of exercise equipment in our basement, with a nice HDTV mounted on the wall right in front of it, so there is absolutely no excuse for me to not be using it.  My weekly weigh-ins will include a report on my exercise activity.
3. I will work on my other New Years Goals that have nothing to do with weight, because I firmly believe that I will be more effective at living a healthy life if I feel good about myself in other aspects.  The other goals are relatively personal, but they focus on my mental, spiritual, and emotional health, and they all have concrete plans attached to them too.
4. I will take extra care when eating out.  That means avoiding fast food and choosing healthy options when we go to restaurants.  It also means Beth and I will share meals when we eat out.  And of course, it means cutting down on the overall number of times I eat out.
5. Finally, I will re-commit to eating healthy here at home.  That includes three things: a) eating smaller portions at mealtimes; b) eating healthier foods for meals and snacks; and c) not eating anything late at night, and limiting any after-dinner snacks to light, healthy options like fruit or veggies.

This is basically an improvement on the formula that helped me to lose four or five pounds a week this past summer, so I have no doubt that I will be able to average three pounds a week.  (I actually expect to be closer to that four or five number at first, but I also expect that the progress will naturally slow down as I get closer to my optimum weight.)

So I will have my first official weigh-in tomorrow morning.  It will be disappointing — between two more weeks of prednisone and Christmas yummies, I have gained about 12 or 13 pounds, probably.  But it will be the kickstart I need to make 2009 a truly life-changing year for me.

Thank you all for your support, and I look forward to sharing this process with you here.  You can look forward to more frequent post, because I know it is important for me to report everything here, whether it’s good or bad.  It will help give me the sense of accountability I need.

Happy New Year!

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