Every Monday is a New Year
You've heard the story about New Year's Eve. We all know the cockamamie culture around setting resolutions by the 1st of January and forgetting them by the 10th.
I personally believe in New Year's resolutions - I believe that priming your brain to do better is a legitimate way to be better than you are. I've so far kept up with my plans. The issue is in two things: dedication, and planning. There are three aspects to this: definition, achievability, and grinding.
New Year Resolutions fail because we don't plan them.
Goals like "lose weight" and "eat better" don't work because they are vague, vapid, feel-good cliches. Lose weight how? Eat better how? I've set the goal, now what do I do? A definitive goal would be like "Do 360 workouts this year". But there's another problem there - you've left no room for failure.
You can't go from zero to hero in one time frame - as you practice and plug along, you learn lessons and lock down motivation that creates good habits. Leaving room for failure allows you to keep motivation high while your habits settle into place. A definitive and achievable goal would be "Do 260 workouts this year, with a sequential target of 300 workouts." If I achieve the 260, great. If I have room to manage 300, I've knocked it out of the park.
Next comes the grind, and this is where we fail the most. Habits don't form unless we perform. Reaffirming our dedication on a regular basis is necessary if we want to accomplish long term goals.
Every Monday is a new year, because every Sunday potentially gives us that sweet, sweet 'restart' feeling that we use as an opportunity to reaffirm our goals.
The feeling of a restart can be achieved every Sunday instead of every January 1st.
I haven't lost any of my depression weight despite working out more than an average person. I see progress, sure - tighter and larger muscles, but no drop in weight. It's time to tackle my eating habits.
Yesterday I prepared a meal plan for the week. I boiled 10 eggs, 2 for each weekday (they keep for 7 days in the fridge). I also portioned out 3 muesli meals, and created 2 oatmeal+fruit meal packs. Now every morning, I only have to pull it out of the fridge and put it in my office bag. Along with that, I've created a rough 5-meal plan for each day, and fixed the workouts that I'm going to do.
Breakfast prepared for the weekdays: Muesli, oats with oranges, muesli, oats with apple and cinnamon, muesli.
I got the oats idea from this wonderful blog post that you can see here: The Yummy Life's No-Cook Refrigerator Oats.
If this works, I'm going to be spending all my Sunday evenings like this. It's a comfortable feeling knowing that I've planned my week out. It makes it easier to lose bad habits and practice good ones.
Do you plan your weeks? Are you still holding on to your new year's resolutions? Comment below so we can get ideas from each other. Thank you for reading.