At this time of year many folks ask, ‘Are you making any New Year’s resolutions?’. Spoiler alert – I am not. I’m not opposed to setting resolutions. I simply find that my tendency is to set unrealistic resolutions and then if not met or kept, I beat myself up. Life is too short. And life throws some pretty tough punches, so why should/would I add more punishment (and self-inflicted)? As noted in a prior post, I have set some general goals…focusing on moving incrementally in the right direction.

I don’t want to dwell on my mistakes, but thought I’d share an example of an unrealistic resolution and its boomerang effect. Years ago I went on the Atkins diet. If you haven’d done Atkins or any one of the myriad of similar diets, they usually start with a detox phase. The first two weeks you abstain from sugar, alcohol, carbs, caffeine. You are supposed to introduce banned items slowly (and in limits) after those two weeks, but I thought to myself ‘No carbs! Carbs are bad!’ and refused to reintroduce them. I did great and lost weight for 9 months. I’m thinking this is awesome! I’ve lost the weight I wanted to, I’m NEVER eating carbs again. Then…one day it happened…I had a hankering for a blueberry muffin. And that was it. The dam broke. I carbed up like a Sumo wrestler preparing for a meet…and 1) put back on all the weight I had lost and 2) went into a serious self-loathing mood that lasted for awhile.

Lesson learned!

Maybe its just word play but there’s an air of positivity to creating a habit that I rather prefer to resolution. I recently saw something online about the rule of 100 hours. There’s lots of articles about it that you can google. along with supporters and detractors. The gist of it is that you take on some task just for 18 minutes each day and voila at the end of the year, you’ve done said task for 100 hours and are a ‘master’. So I may try to tackle something 18 minutes each day… I’ll keep you posted.

Right now, I’m just trying to get back into the habit of writing this blog. So I better hit Publish now before I forget!

Happy Monday!

Mary

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