January is resolution time. Every year I am reminded of that phenomenon by the plethora of ads for exercise related everything and clean eating/dieting adverts galore. Organizing gear and literature goes on sale and Pinterest feeds are alight with goal setting printables and get you stuff together quotes and courses. It's quite a crush.
Now, I love goals, and periodically I evaluate where I am at regarding what I am doing or how I am behaving. My ultimate goal is to make sure that my behavior is reflective of my ultimate aim to live each day like the gift it is. Am I becoming a better person? Am I wasting my time? Is this behavior destructive to myself or others? Etc...So I definitely get all this self-improvement sentiment floating around at the beginning of the calendar year.
But oof, all the noise is something!
In the spirit of self-betterment season, however, there are a couple of goals I threw out there and started the work on before the end of December.
#1: Goodbye refined sugar.
A few years ago I crushed my very horrid refined sugar addiction by going off the stuff cold turkey. I didn't have any refined sugar for 6 months and very little for the last 5 years. The cool thing about this very drastic and awesome change is that aside from having much happier skin and insides, no horrendous sugar cravings, and a much more nuanced sense of taste, I just don't really like a ton of sugar in anything at all anymore, period.
That said, over the past couple of years I have gotten lazy on my eating and during the pandemic and holidays I ate WAY more sugar that I should have. The result has been a ten pound weight gain over the last two years.
Now, I am sorta old and really don't care if people find me attractive or not, I mean I have been happily married for twenty-two years. But I am a big believer in taking care of the meat husk you are blessed with and after spending a lifetime of not feeling good, I love to feel good.
So, goodbye sugar.
My initial goal was not to have any refined sugar for the next 30 days and stick to eating the way I did when I lost all seventy pounds of excess fat that plagued me and made my life an auto-immune disorder nightmare for so long. The way I eat is a combination of Trim Healthy Mama, Keto, and Intermittent Fasting days. The combination of the way of noshing works for me because I have a metabolism that is weirder than a module from Dune.
Which brings me to goal two, goodbye twenty pounds.
Now, I work out every week, in fact, all through the holidays I consistently went to the gym on top of all my very physical farm labor. The thing is though, to get in the kind of shape I wish to be in I am going to have to go a lot harder. Like training at least five days a week harder. Yee Haw.
The cool thing is, I am much older and far more patient now, so I have given myself and entire quarter (twelve weeks) to attain that goal. Being gracious to one's self is essential to accomplishment. I'm already down four pounds over the past couple of weeks and that's because I am not trying to do a get it done quick sort of scenario. Those attempts sometimes work but the results rarely endure. I like the enduring stuff.
And that brings me to my third goal, which is a collaborative goal. For the last 18 months I have been cohosting a podcast. It's an existential philosophical BS session of gloriousness, I The Show. My cohosts and I spent this afternoon after recording our latest episode discussing where we want to go as whole.
Well, we want to go to Hive.
So here's goal number three: This week I will be starting I The Show's Hive page and get us all signed up on 3Speak. From there we will be posting a short intro video and then weekly topical episodes where we have an all out topical gnashing fest of the kind that we tend to excel at.
I'm so excited to share this other part of what I do with you all. A little scared too, for as a bit of a private person, the idea of putting myself out there is a bit terrifying.
But as I have learned from doing the work, as uncomfortable as it sometimes can be, the end result of accomplishment makes the endeavor always worth the journey!