New Year’s Resolutions: There’s Always A Fresh Start If You’re Willing To Take It

Life In The Low Carb Lane: New Year’s Resolutions

Ah, the start of the new year… What could be better? It’s a fresh slate, a clean sweep, and you can’t help feeling hopeful. No matter how good (or bad) last year was, there is always the potential for this coming year to be better.

If you fell off the low-carb wagon over the holidays, jump right back on now. If you’re just starting a low-carbohydrate lifestyle in an effort to gain control of your weight and overall health, welcome aboard! I’m glad that you’re here, no matter what route you took to get here or what the reasons are you’re here. There’s room for everyone, and I firmly believe that not only can everyone benefit, but everyone can contribute, too.

I wrote a column about New Year’s resolutions in 2001, and what I said then still applies.
I’d like to expand upon it this New Year, though, because my life in 2004 will be very different from my life in 2003. Yours may well be, too.

What Is A New Year’s Resolution?

New Year’s Resolutions are promises that we make to ourselves. Some of us believe in making New Year’s resolutions; some don’t. I happen to believe in them. I believe that it is our obligation to strive to better ourselves, and that making promises to ourselves to do certain things (or not do certain things, as the case may be) will help us to accomplish our goals and is one tool we that can use to improve ourselves. The trouble is that most of us don’t know squat about making effective promises – to ourselves or to anybody else.

Many of us don’t know much about keeping promises, either – especially to ourselves. I, like many of you, are much more adept at making promises than keeping them. One of my goals this year is to make only promises that I keep! There’s to be no more disappointing myself or others. I guess that that is my first and most important resolution.

We Need To Think About Our Goals First

Introspection is a dying skill in today’s instant gratification society. Many of us would rather have someone else do our thinking for us. We want people to tell us what to do rather than make the sometimes painful effort to establish our goals for ourselves. But if we want to better ourselves and achieve our goals, honest introspection is necessary. No one can do that for us, because no one knows us as well as we know ourselves.

Good New Year’s resolutions don’t pop into our heads at 11:59 on New Year’s Eve. Good New Year’s resolutions require some thought, some honest study of ourselves and our goals. Who are we now? Who do we want to become? What do we really want to do, feel, and achieve during the coming year? What path do we want to take to get there? How much effort are we willing and able to put into accomplishing our goals?

We need to think through all these things before committing to specific resolutions. It takes time, and the time to start is now.

The First Step Is Setting Goals

The first step in forming a good New Year’s resolution is to establish our goals. The goals can have a broad scope. Our goals might include “I want to be thin,” or better yet, “I want to be as healthy as possible.” They might include “I want to be a better parent,” or “I want to become financially stable.” They might be more mundane, such as “I want to have a clean, organized home.”

These goals are our own, and we can make them whatever we want them to be as long as they are achievable. By achievable, I mean that our goals must be realistic; they must be physically and/or emotionally possible. For example, if I set my goal as “I want to look like I’m twenty again,” then I have set an unrealistic, physically impossible goal for myself. I’m never, ever going to look like I’m twenty again, and if I make that my goal I’m setting myself up for failure. A better goal would be “I want to feel good about how I look.”

Don’t set unrealistic goals, and don’t set too many. If we overload ourselves we’re bound to fail. I personally think that we should have no more than five goals at any given time, and that three is probably a more reasonable number. Once we have achieved our first set of goals, we can always establish more. We’ve got the rest of our lives to do it.

And New Year’s is not the only time we can make resolutions. As soon as we achieve one goal, we should immediately move on to another.

How To Craft A Good New Year’s Resolution

Once we’ve set our goals, we need to decide how we are going to accomplish them. Crafting good resolutions is an art, and there are certain parameters we need to follow to give ourselves the best possible chance of success.

1. A good resolution must be for ourselves. Resolutions should not be promises we make to other people, but promises we make to ourselves for ourselves. That does not mean that our resolutions are selfish; they can benefit others. Is saying “I want to lose weight and be physically fit” selfish? In some respects, yes, but a physically fit person is a better parent, a better spouse, and/or a better coworker simply because they are thinner and physically fit.One woman on one of the low carb support lists told other list mates about going roller skating with her daughter’s Girl Scout troop – and actually roller skating with her daughter rather than sitting on the sidelines and merely watching. Her daughter was thrilled with her mother’s participation, and spent the time skating and holding hands with her mother rather than her friends. The mother stated that this was something that she never would have attempted before she lost weight low carbing. So, did her “selfish” desire to lose weight benefit her child? Absolutely!
2. A good resolution must be private. We shouldn’t set ourselves up for public scrutiny by broadcasting our resolutions. We’ll know if we kept them, and since our resolutions are for ourselves, they are nobody else’s business.I’ve thought about this since last year, and have come to the conclusion that perhaps at least some goals should be made public. My problem is that I’m not sure exactly which goals should be private and which goals should be public.Perhaps some goals should start out privately and then, at a moment we choose, they should become public. For example, if losing weight is one of my goals, perhaps I should start out my lifestyle change privately, and then (when people begin to notice my weight loss) acknowledge it publicly.
3. A good resolution must be small because a good resolution must be achievable on a daily or weekly basis. “I’m going to get into a size 10 by next Christmas” is a goal, not a resolution. A New Year’s resolution would be something small that we can do to help us achieve this goal. For example, our resolution could be “I’m going to stick with low carbing and not cheat on the weekends. “Or it might be “I’m going to stop bringing high carb snacks into the house because they tempt me and then I end up cheating,” or even simply “I am going to drink all my water every day.”Once I have I am routinely achieving my initial resolution, say, not cheating on the weekends, then I can add another resolution on to of it. For example, if by February 1st I haven’t cheated on the weekends, then I can add, “I am going to walk for a half an hour 3 days a week,” to it. I will still maintain my first resolution of not cheating, but I will layer another resolution on top of it. On March 1st I might amend my second resolution to, “I am going to walk for half an hour 5 days a week.” And so on and so on throughout the year, solidifying each positive change in my lifestyle before adding another.

• A good resolution must be specific. “I’m going to become physically fit,” is a goal and is not specific. How are we going to become physically fit? Specific resolutions that would help us become more physically fit might be: “I’m going to walk for a half an hour five days a week,” or “I’m going to weight train at the health club three times a week,” or “I’m going to get an exercise tape, and I’m going to use it every other day.”(In my own personal case, this last resolution would read “I’m going to clean 10 years’ of accumulated dust off the exercise tapes I already have and actually use them every other day.)
• A good resolution must require some effort. Good resolutions should be achievable, but not necessarily easy. If we already drink all our water every day, then”I’m going to drink all my water every day,” is not a good resolution for us. A better one would be, “I’m going to stay low carb on the weekends,” or, “I’m going tocompletely avoid the Friday donut tray at the office.”
• A good resolution must lead to other resolutions. We are all works in progress, and that progress shouldn’t stop until the day we die. Once we have achieved our initial goal, we should move on to a new one, and we shouldn’t wait for next New Year’s Day, either. A good resolution like “I’m going to walk for half an hour five days a week,” can segue into “I’m going to walk a mile in twenty minutes,” to “I’m going to walk two miles in half an hour.”

Write Down Your Goals And Resolutions

Goals and resolutions which are just floating around in our minds are not fully formed. We need to write them down; we need to make them concrete. The act of writing our goals and resolutions down gives them body and substance and gives us a better chance of keeping them.

I actually went out and got some pretty printed paper with a decorative border so that I can type my goals and resolutions for 2001 out, save them as a file, and print them out. I’m going to keep a copy of them in my already overloaded wallet and another one in the drawer of my bedside table, and I’m going to review them on a daily basis to reinforce their importance to me and to track how I’m doing.

And as I complete or establish new patterns with each resolution, I’m going to put a star beside it and add a new, perhaps tougher, resolution to the list.

Categorizing Your Goals And Resolutions

Since none of us is perfect, we all have different areas in our lives that we want to improve upon. Just as our weight is merely a facet of ourselves, our weight loss goals shouldn’t be the only ones we have.

Personally, I am far less than perfect; in fact there are days that I feel fatally flawed. I’ve got a lot of things I want to work on, so many that if I listed them all I’d just get confused. (My husband has always said that if I ever developed Alzheimer’s Disease he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.) I’m going to be very choosey about what I decide to work on and not take too big a bite out of my foibles.

It helps to categorize our goals. For example, I have broken the various areas of my life down into the following categories, and am going to determine one main goal in each one. These are fairly broad categories, and allow me quite a bit of flexibility in choosing my goals.

• Health: how I can maximize my weight loss and improve my total health.
• Lifestyle: how I can improve the way I live on a daily basis.
• Education: how I can learn about something new and continue to grow intellectually.
• Service To Others: how I can better serve someone else on a personal level.

Now I’m going to break one of my own rules and explain my goals and resolutions for a couple of the categories. I’ll start with “Service To Others.” My goal is to be more giving, and put my money where my mouth is. My resolutions are to:

• Donate to Habitat to Humanity quarterly rather than once a year.
• Donate food to a local food pantry during the summer when they really need it rather than just at Christmas, when everybody else does.
• Take my mother-in-law into my home to care for her, since my father-in-law is not longer physically able todo it. Treat her like a queen, let her know in the last days of her life that she is truly loved.
• Help my newly retired husband to find a hobby or discover something he is truly interested because if he’s home all day administrating me the way he does the kids at the high school, I will kill him. I love him and want him to be around for a long time – sporadically.

In the category of “Lifestyle,” my goal is the have a clean and clutter-free house – or at least one that doesn’t require donning hip waders to travel from the garage to the living room. (You have no idea what a monumental goal this is for me. I am a pack rat of the first order. I could win a Nobel Prize for clutter if there were such a category. Please suggest it to the prize committee. I need the money.)

We are moving into a new house in a few weeks, and my resolutions are simple:

• No box, bag, or bin shall cross the threshold of the new house until I know exactly where I am going to put the contents.
• After the move is finished, I will clean out one closet a week, pitching things with abandon. When I have made a complete circuit of all the closets, I will repeat the process. (Closets, like children, do not remain clean.)
• Completely clean and de-clutter one room a month, getting rid of as much “stuff” as possible. I will not pack it up for a garage sale that is never going to happen. I will give it away or throw it away. I will not replace old”stuff” with new “stuff.”
• Put things away immediately rather than pile things up “until I get around to it.”

The “Education” category is easy. There are so many things I want to learn how to do! I will:

• Learn how to use power tools. I want to build stuff, although discretion dictates that I build nothing that anyone is going to stand on. (I know the limits of both myself and my insurance policy.) I think I’ll start with bat houses. They look simple enough for even me to make, and bats eat mosquitoes. I hate mosquitoes, and the new house is on a lake.
• Learn to make mosaics out of tile. My dad once made a lovely tabletop out of tiles, and I’d like to do this in remembrance of him.
• Take a cake decorating class. (That may sound extremely odd for a low carber, but I really don’t want to decorate cakes. I want to make the flowers and such out of thick plaster or something like that so that I can use them for crafting.)
• Borrow some my my son’s and his girlfriend’s college texts once they’re done with semester and read them. I have two lined up already: my son’s “Environmental Politics” text and his girlfriend’s “Violence and Religion” text. They’re not going to be light reading, but they sound fascinating.

Beyond New Year’s Resolutions

I don’t think that our goals and resolutions should only be examined at the beginning of the year. Our goals and our resolutions should reflect our progress, be constantly updated and expanded, and evolve as we do. This can’t be done just one day a year. It’s an ongoing process worthy of our time and attention.

This year, once I have achieved a goal or resolution or have made a long term goal or resolution a habit (drinking all my water, for example), then I will go into the stored file on my computer and alter the list of goals and resolutions to reflect my progress and add new resolutions to replace the ones that I have achieved or made into ingrained habits.

I will add new goals as I successfully complete my current goals, and develop new resolutions to compliment my new goals. I will never accept the status quo as the way it has to be. I will continue to strive for personal growth, and through that, for personal fulfillment.

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