Out of control

Welcome January. The month I take down my Christmas tree and actually get my Christmas letters sent (maybe, they are still in a semi-assembled pile). And the month to take back a little bit of control.

November AND December were doozies on both the spending and eating front. Spending I’ll talk about in a later post. Today I’ll talk about my friend, food.

Welcome back, overeating. I hadn’t missed you a bit. Christmas cutout cookie? Don’t mind if I do. Latte? Yes please. With whipped cream? Of course. Massive amounts of cheesy potatoes? I thought you’d never ask. Christmas cutout cookie? Sure, I’ll have another (five). Pie? MMMMMM. Pie.

And thus was my November and December. Between moving, multiple sicknesses making their home in our family, and holiday festivies I fell into some old, bad habits. I would start out each day great. Healthy breakfast. Nourishing lunch. Then somewhere between lunch and bed I’d find cookies and it would spiral downward. One cookie is a treat. Six cookies…overkill. And I told myself “you can take it off in January.”

So it’s January. Five pounds up (it was eight, but I’ve been pretty healthy this week). Still at a healthier weight than I was a year ago. But I’m committed to getting my weight back to where it was…for health (and to be honest, a bit of vanity). The last five are not just “bloat” pounds…you know, the kind that a few days of eating healthy takes away…I already lost those three. The last five are honest to goodness not good for me weight. So I’m on week 2 of my cookie detox. I told myself I wouldn’t punish myself, but the cookies had to go. And I forgot how incredibly HARD sticking to a strict healthy eating plan was. After the weight is gone it’s easy to look back and think “that wasn’t so bad”…but now that I’m living it again it really is incredibly hard. Not impossible, just hard.

So fellow cookie detoxers…take heart. It can be done. It will be done. It isn’t easy. It isn’t fun. And you should find some joy in what’s on your plate. For me, the joy for now is in some really yummy butternut squash soup and not a frosted snowman.

And now for something completely different

 

Resolved: In 2013 I will:

Bask more. Love more. Play more. Be easy on myself. I will never get it all done, so I might as well be fun.*

I’m a go getter. Driven by a to do list. Plagued by that never ending list. Motivated by specific and achievable goals. And that has helped me and my family in a lot of ways. But for this year I decided I’ve spent too much time trying to improve myself and my home that I’ve left little, if any, time to just enjoy life.

So this year I’m going to spend more time playing games with the kids and less time worried about if all the pieces are put away (at least right now). I’m going to enjoy time having friends and family over to our home and not worry about perfection in the décor or state of cleanliness. I’m going to exercise for my enjoyment and health and not out of a sense of guilt or fear of regaining weight. I’m going to silence my iphone and engage in meaningful conversation with my husband (actually making eye contact, not our usual conversation in which we are usually both alternately looking at each other then our facebook newsfeed). 

I want to rediscover my silly and fun self that seems to have been lost in a haze of HGTV, fitness magazines, other people's "shoulds" and Pinterest.

My resolution is completely uncharacteristic of the goals I've had the last few years. They were measurable. Time bound. Quantified. And I still believe if you really want to achieve something like weight loss, a career change, or paying off debt that written and specific goals are absolutely the way to go. But for this resolution I will just celebrate the successes and learn from the failures.

Success #1: Enjoying a quiet evening of take out pizza and conversation with friends on New Year's Eve and being in bed before 10:00 PM.

Failure #1: Spending all of New Year's Day and the following day painting and trying to be Ty Pennington in our master suite. 

Success #2: Setting aside my to do list and sitting down to blog with a cup of yummy coffee (I even have my kindle here ready for a few moments of reading).

Success #3: Waiting until January 3 to declare my resolution.

And such will be my year.

*Adapted from the wall art at Meijer that is shown above. My budget-minded self made me put it back on the shelf so I can’t credit the artist.