Happy New Year everyone! As I said a few weeks ago, this year's blogging will be about weight loss and healthier living. I will be posting weekly, hopefully, easy tips to follow and incorporate throughout 2012 to meet your personal goals for the year. This is the first of these posts and as promised in my Facebook teaser there is to be no changes made this month. How easy is that? If you're interested read on...
So, you want to be healthier, maybe lose weight, maybe exercise more, maybe eat better. You have sketchy type goals in mind or maybe even some concrete ones. You may have smaller goals (eat less meat, add more water) or larger goals (run a marathon, become vegetarian) but no matter what goals you've been contemplating you have to actually have a game plan so that you'll actually take the steps to accomplish your goals.
For this first week of January I would like you to take a few minutes to write down your goals. Make them reasonable for you. Rather than decide you're going to lose 100 pounds this year, maybe pick something like 2 pounds per month, since slower tends to last longer and be easier to manage than crashing through only to give up a month in since you don't seem to be headed in the right direction quick enough. If you never exercise then perhaps saying you'd like to be exercising 4 days per week for 1 hour per day consistently by the end of the year would make more sense than running a marathon or signing up for a gym membership today.
I would suggest picking 3 areas of health to work on: weight loss, exercise and eating. You may have more than one goal in each of these areas but try not to overdo it. Always think less is more. You want to accomplish the goals not frustrate yourself. So as an example you may list your ideals (By the end of 2012 I want to weigh X pounds, be able to walk/run X kilometres X times per week, eat X calories per day with X vegetarian days per week and no more than X red meats per month.) This is just an example as obviously your goals need to be goals you want to achieve and make sense for you. You may want to throw in a brain challenge as well, like taking a nutrition class, cooking class, reading a how to run/strength train or add supplements book or e-newsletter. Remember if you find your goals accomplished earlier than the end of the year you can always set new ones again.
The most important part this week is to write them down. You may want to write down a long list of goals and then stroke out the ones that seem unreasonable or sabotaging until you are left with a few that seem manageable and then tweak them to make sure they are not so easy that there is no sense of accomplishment when you achieve them. Remember the goal is to achieve them in 12 months so this is no speed race. Time is on your side.
Once you have your goals written out over the next day or two then take them out every day and read them until next week's blog. Make sure you feel you really own them. They are goals YOU want to achieve and not ones you feel pressured by others to achieve. Don't share these goals with anyone, just enjoy knowing you have a secret to accomplish. Then next Monday check back in for the next step towards accomplishing your goals.
Looking forward to challenging you and me throughout 2012. Have a great week.
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