For most of my adult life, I've played the game of making New Years resolutions - mostly around eating less and exercising more. And for most of that time, just as easily as I made the resolutions, my resolve seemed to fade into the ether. That's probably the reason I skipped resolutions this past year - why even bother?
But something is different this year. I'm sharing my resolutions publicly. I'm hoping that my friends reading this will shame me into keeping the resolve if they see me straying.
On to the list, which of course has the requisite eating and exercising items on it:
Drinking - It's a very common thing for me to meet "for drinks". So common, that I probably do it on average of 3-4 days a week, and some days have more than one such meeting. In addition, it's pretty rare for me to have dinner and skip a glass - or two - of red wine. I'm not planning on completely cutting out alcohol, but I am planning on a significant reduction. With that, I resolve not to drink alcohol more than 2 nights in any week.
Eating - I go through spurts of healthy eating but somehow manage to sabotage myself with bad decisions on weeklong vacations, indulging at sporting events, or coming up with other excuses. At some point in the last year, I tried to go "mostly" Paleo, and think I felt great during that stretch. I'm going to need my wife's help on this one, but I resolve go all in on Paleo. I'm looking forward to placing my first MealMade order on Monday. Caveat: by all in, I plan on sticking to the spirit of the plan rather than being absolute - I'm sure I'll still have salad dressing, ketchup and other condiments that don't conform.
Walking - I make it a point to walk to my meetings as often as possible. Once or twice a week, I'll even walk the 3 miles from my house to SoMa - I often spend the time on phone calls so it's quite productive. I average just over 10k daily steps on a weekly basis (9.5k for the past year as shown in the pic), but the daily totals range from just under 4k steps to over 15k steps. I want to be more consistent and so I resolve to walk at least 8k steps 6 days per week. I'm hopeful this will act as a gateway for making healthy choices.
Television - I have a habit of turning on the television once the kids go to bed and once on, the tv doesn't turn off until I go to sleep - often 3 or 4 hours later. Although I tell myself that I'm using the tv as background noise while I work on my laptop, the truth is that whatever I'm working on gets less focus and it takes me longer to complete, and all the while, some useless junk is permeating my brain. I'm not quite ready to go cold turkey, but I resolve to not watch more than one hour of tv per night. Caveat: watching football all day does not count as watching tv!
Blogging - I keep threatening to write more, but haven't been able to make this a consistent practice. I'm willing to bet I should be able to manufacture 50 things to write about over the course of this year (first one will be done as soon as I publish this post!), so I resolve to blog at least once per week.
Reading - As a kid, I was a very avid reader. While my parents had visions of me reading the Encyclopedia Brittanica they had purchased for me (it's still in my bookcase at my parents' house), the truth is I was more interested in fiction. Regardless of the topic, I want to get back to reading something other than the content clicked through various URLs and instead get back to books. I resolve to read at least one book every month.
These resolutions are invariably linked together and I'm hopeful that doing well with one of them will help me do better with the rest. Less tv and alcohol will certainly give me more time to read, write and even sleep better (not one of my resolutions, but would be a great side effect of the others). Let's see what happens!