New Year, New You

The New Year is just around the corner. 2019! Of course, with the new year comes resolutions. I don’t know about you, but I’m not a fan.  Most of us fail at them, pretty spectacularly. Not in the epic, blaze of glory sense, but more like a dud firecracker. We’ve all been there. We set up the resolution. We plan and envision it. Yet, by January 10th or so it has collapsed around us. Or worse, we failed to even start.

I believe this happens because when we think of our resolutions, we think of huge goals that tend to be abstract (like “lose weight”) and when you do that you don’t have checkpoints along the way or any small goals so in turn you just have this great big huge task and it really becomes an impossibility. Overwhelming.

So if our resolutions are just doomed to fail, why do we make a resolution every New Years? I think the obvious answer is that most of us have stuff in our lives that we don’t like or that we think could be improved upon. Something that we know we could do better to  improve our quality of life and increase how much we enjoy our life. Yet, it doesn’t seem to work out as we had hoped.

In fact, this becomes such a discouraging process that many people don’t even make resolutions anymore. Further, we often give up on more than our resolutions, we give up on ourselves. I can totally understand why a person might feel that way but to give up on trying to improve our lives, doesn’t seem to be the answer either. I propose that you need a game plan. What I would call a resolution solution. Basically, make a list of small changes for your life and from that list choose four items.  Each quarter of the year you’re going to add one of these items into your lifestyle. So they should be simple things that you can do easily and readily. This way changes won’t be overwhelming and what you’ll find is that over the course of the year the small changes will add up to big differences. So for example, you could say: I’m going to stop eating sugar, I’m going to cut out all white flour, I’m going to drink more water, and I’m going to exercise everyday. In January you would implement one of those changes. Changes like these are really simple to do at home and they’re not expensive. No excuses! Simply, you would do one change for the first three months of the year (for the first quarter ), at the beginning of the next quarter, you would layer in the next change. So instead of making wholesale changes all at once you’re slowly adding these changes and the changes have a compound effect, in terms of health benefits. You’re stacking small easy tasks to reach bigger goals. By the end of the year you wouldn’t need to make a resolution because you’d already be much healthier than you had been the previous year. I really like the idea of this because when we try to complete our resolutions we do wholesale lifestyle changes and they’re just impossible to maintain. As we learned in the 1991 Bill Murray/Richard Dreyfuss film, “What About Bob?”…..baby steps.

So here’s my proposed list of possible small changes that you can make quarterly throughout the year:

1. Drink more water. Almost all of us, tend to be dehydrated. Drink coffee, tea, or alcohol? All of these actually dehydrate you more! You should shoot for half your body weight in ounces of water per day.
2. Cut out sugar. It decreases your immune system and damages your insulin response. It also makes you gain weight and provides empty calories,there’s no point to it.
3. White flour…cut it out. See sugar.
4. Exercise every single day. I think that should be a given.
5. Start seeing a chiropractor. Most people have some kind of spinal or structural abnormalities if they have never seen a chiropractor, our spines like all else in out body requires maintenance. Those types of problems don’t let your body function efficiently. Most folks I know, think they feel fine but then say things like: “I’m just having my normal headache/back pain/etc.” Symptoms mean something. Don’t ignore them.
6. Slow down: we are all too busy, take time everyday to do something for yourself, read, pray, stretch, or just sit.
7. Get organized: go room by room (one per week, perhaps) and make your living and work spaces, work for you

The goals can also involve things such as finances, mental peace, spiritual health, or whatever else you can imagine. I want to challenge you to sit down today and write a list of as many solutions as possible. Sleep on it.  Now choose the four you will focus on. Don’t over complicate this. Pick them and put the dates on your calendar, upon which you will add them to your life. You will fail, you will trip….don’t quit. Fulfill this plan and have, perhaps, your best year ever.  Then next year you won’t have to make resolutions, you’ll be too busy enjoying results.