Wednesday, January 02, 2013

New Year's Resolutions

I've been told that two of my resolutions are boring. There was a blog post on Huffington Post by Ariana Huffington about should be resolutions and in the comment section I put these two:

1. When I plan to cook dinner.....cook!

2. Stop having extra cans of coke, 8 a week is enough.

I did explain about the diet first. Boring = realistic. That's what I responded with. They might be boring but they are doable. Another commenter said she liked that my resolutions are practical. Resolutions are usually about breaking bad habits. One example: you need that diet because of the bad habits that caused the weight gain. I already examined that particular bad habit with that chart I made about my triggers (mentioned in a previous post). I stopped making that chart when one thing became clear..........I don't regret most of the times I cave. Christmas cookies on cookie baking day, please, it would be evil to say after spending two hours making them I couldn't have three small ones with 8oz of  1% milk! In almost every case I would have still caved, that means I already cut out a lot of the times I used to cave but regretted it.

But I have a weakness about cooking. With all of us sick the week before Christmas, dinner wasn't what we planned. Even when I was healthy there were just times the past two weeks where I just was either too unmotivated to cook or too tired to cook. I love to cook but last week I felt like I spent the whole day in the kitchen, every day. That's because once Zach got his appetite back it hit full force and I spent many hours either getting him food, telling him "no, you just ate", or keeping him out of the fridge and his stool away from the counter because I had just said "no, you just ate". I absolutely didn't starve him. With the childhood obesity epidemic it's reasonable to want to teach your child moderation, stopping when full, and not to eat when bored. At least most of what he ate was healthy! But healthy takes more work then unhealthy and after all that preparing healthy all day when it came time to make dinner I just didn't want to do all that work.

Don't judge you do that too. Everyone has times when they just don't want to cook. Sometimes you make yourself cook anyway but other times it just isn't going to happen. Most of the time I make myself cook anyway because it's what's best for my family. But when you are having a really bad day and tried shopping/browsing online and that didn't help sometimes comfort food is the only alternative. That's right, I tried something else first so I can't feel guilty for that pizza that turned out to be cold so I couldn't enjoy it. Luckily, the next day I randomly checked the price of a new desk chair we need since Zach is so big now and we had enough to get it without getting in the way of the other things we have saved up for. Of course that means we'll still need another chair anyway since one of our chairs is taped together but we need three so we can live with the taped chair until we see what the tax refund looks like. I had budgeted $150 but between a sale, $25 coupon, and free shipping the final total with tax was $101.62. See, shopping eventually worked just not when I needed it. I just wish I had thought to check about that chair the day before! Josh's birthday is tomorrow so it's one of his gifts.

With Zach home for two weeks I found myself needing the extra caffeine so that is an easy resolution to live up to because he's back in school and that makes self-discipline easier. That self-discipline is important. The main reason I gained 12 lbs since mid-March when the diet ended is because when I was faced with "rest of my life" eating I couldn't stay with what I had been doing in the diet. There were sacrifices I had made for that diet that just weren't going to happen. What I have been doing since October is finding a better balance to help loose weight again without giving up those things that are important. I had lost two pounds again by early December but am staying away from the scale for a while. When I talked to my regular doctor in December we worked out things. I can still have salami sandwiches but five slices not six and no cheese with it. That's been easy to do and it still lasts until dinner. No more hot dog lunches but we didn't really like the pre-grilled chicken wraps so we'll do homemade burgers with fresh veggies and nothing on the side. The only thing my nutritionist didn't like about that was the buns but it's not a burger without a bun. That's like when people tell me Caesar salad is unhealthy even without croutons. I just tune that out since now the expectations are unreasonable. The burger is still healthier then two hot dogs with ketchup, mustard, baked beans and sauerkraut. It's also not that much work so I still have energy to make dinner. That's where I learned my eating out weakness. When I cook a nice breakfast (like I do when Josh is home) and put a lot of effort into lunch there just isn't enough motivation for dinner. So lunch has to be quick and easy.

My last resolution exists because of something out of my control. It is to be motivated to do my exercise routines again. Lately, I've been having issues with my CD player. In the middle of my exercises the music gets snowy and sometimes starts to skip. I had just burnt the CDs but they were colored so I got plain CDs and had the same problem. The same CD player is fine with batteries and I think plugged into Zach's room but it has issues in the living room. After trying four times to exercise and having to stop in the middle of my routine I just lost motivation to do my routine. Just this morning I had the batteries in the CD player and was doing my Classic Dance routine and halfway through just didn't want to anymore. I didn't want to do a routine to begin with today but I needed the exercise. The snow and skipping just was too frustrating an experience even though that didn't happen today. Monday's exercise was a lot of cleaning that included hard scrubbing. Yesterday was decorating day, Zach helped. I'm not sure how this will work out but the motivation will be there when we fix the problem. I'm just concerned that the outside wire is frozen and that's what's effecting it. It's Winter, it'll be frozen for a long time. By the time it unfreezes I can walk for exercise again. In the meantime, I can walk around stores or something.

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