New Year's Resolutions and the reason I hate them.

 Happy New Year!

It is that time of year again where its a new year so you hear all about new year's resolutions. I hate new year's resultions. Making changes in the new year to better yourself is a good thing and I think people should always look to improve their lives even if just a little. You might wonder how I could hate something that I think is a good idea and the answer to why I hate them is simple. Every time I made a reslution in the past for new year's or I hear others talk about theirs they are lofty and pie in the sky things. Example for this is one of my friends this year made a reslution to go to the gym every day before they go to work this year. That type of goal is so overwhelming and lofty that it is not something they will be able to do and the faillure of reaching the goal a few times will deflate them and make it so they end up not changing anything in the slightest. To be clear I hope they make their goal for going to the gym every day before work its just that the reality is they will not be able to go one day for some reason or another. 

Most people have been there and made goals like this and do stick to them for a while and the idea of making changes in your life even for a short while is a good thing. I think that changing the idea of what the goals are and how you do a new year reslution and make it less loft is better than trying to move a mountain overnight. Making shorter but obtainable goals over the year is better and if you can make the goals a bit vague but with a non vague end idea its even better. Example of this would be I will focus on fitness this year. This changes the goal from something you will fail at and feel bad about failing at to something you can focus on and change slowly over the year and not fail while measuring the results at the end. If you made that your goal did you focus on fitness and did you end up chaning the things that made you less fit over the year.

So long and short reason I hate new year's resolutios is becuase of failure and the feeling that nothing will change once you fail which results in not commiting to the changes you wanted to see in the new year. 

  What changes am I planning in the new year.

Last year for me was a lot of good change and this year I am going to continue that trend. As I ranted about before I don't like goals that are easy to fail because they will cause a loss of commiting to a change so my goals are going to be simple. I am going to continue to focus this year on the exercising journey, both the blog and the journey itself. The smaller side focus is going to be focusing on getting better at communicating with friends and other people in my life. After having kids and a demanding job I lost touch with a lot of people and do not socialize nearly as much as I used to. I want to get better at that and make feel more connected to more people at the end of the year. 

 The plan on measuring if I have obtained my goals is simple too. For the first one have I focused my time and energy on making sure I am on the journey still and not just sitting on the couch eating pizza. Have I also updated the blog and updated my social media related to it over the year? If I have done that then it was a successful goal for the year. For the second minor goal to be better at communicating with people I can have the metric be simple as well. Have I been better at contacting people and talking to them than I have the past year? If so then I have achieved that goal as well. The set up on this makes it so that I can fail for a few days or a week and not feel like the whole thing is broken as long as my end goals are true then I achieved my goals. It does not feel like a failure after a short mishap. 

The Journey and how its going.

I have achieved the main parts of my exercising journey but as stated its not a get goals done and its a done deal this is a journey for a reason its going to take a long time and change along the way. I also have failed a little this past month due to the weather and the holiday season making it harder. This was not all just its cold out I am not going to work out I was still cycling in the freezing cold. The month of December is just a bit harder to focus on the goals with all the food and all of the things I have to do with the kids and extended family. I ended up gaining some weight back and that was expected a bit but not as much as I thought I would have ended the year with. I am back up to 159 and that is mostly due to not eating right and not exercising as much as I wanted to over the month. All of this bad sounding information is not really that bad though. Gaining some weight and not getting to exercise as much is not that bad as I have not lost stamina or strength really. I also have not gotten more round I still fit into the size 30 pants just fine so this weight is not as much of a problem as it was in the past where I could not fit into pants anymore. I also know that I am going to be able to focus my engery on the journey again this month and get more exercising in and get back down in weight. 

To put some goals on the next few months of the journey I purchased another bicycle that I am waiting to come in that will allow me to ride even in the snow. I will be making a review of that bike when it gets here in a few days but for now I will be cycling every day I can again. To complement this plan to cycle I started lifting and running again. I have wanted to get those back into the mix for a while and about a week ago I started that back up. The plan for lifting is to be able to get back to lifting some of the weight I used to be able to. Right now not including the bar I am squating 90 lbs and I want to double that by the end of the year. I am only going to add the goal for squats in so concretely because I have done lifting in the past and I was close to double in the past so this is not all that lofty of a goal. 

I hope you have a good new year and if you made resolutions that they go well for you. I am going to stare at the tacking number for my new bike until it arrives. Thank you very much for reading and have a wonderful day and a HAPPY NEW YEAR!