I have been pondering for days what sort of earth-shatteringly important message I should convey at the start of a new year and the end of a decade. In fact I've been so intent on finding exactly the right message, that the new year is already two days old!
Anyway, all the things I wanted to say are more than a blog long, so I shall be sending messages throughout January about (hopefully) interesting and important things.
Sufficed to say, this is the time of year for New Year's Resolutions. These are often hugely ambitious and more in the line of wishful thinking ("if I only had a magic wand" type of stuff). Lose 100kg, turn my life around, exercise every day, never eat chocolate again and so on. They're usually very black and white, i.e. if its not a complete success, it's a total failure. Losing 99kg would be a failure, under these rules.
Think instead of what you can DO, rather than what you WISH would happen.
Example: I started to keep a food diary again and have specified a calorie limit (not very low I might add, but less than I've been consuming recently). I went over the calorie limit yesterday but didn't break into a sweat and a tirade of self-loathing. This is not because I am perfect (although parts of me are excellent - tee hee!) but because I am understanding that plus or minus 10% around that calorie limit is not going to make any difference at all in the long run. So it's actually the mid-point in a range, not an absolute limit. Remember, it's not the food that makes you fat. Its the guilt, shame and self-loathing which causes you to eat more that makes you fat.
Example: I bought 20 visits to the local gym at the end of August 2010. I am probably going to my first session tomorrow, January 3rd. YES, really! I signed up and just could not force myself to go. And I enjoy lifting weights. Strange.... Rather than smacking myself upside the head and finding solace at the bottom of a bag of something greasy, I asked myself why? What was the blockage? And I eventually realised that I was totally burnt out from my paid employment, hating every day I spent doing that work and really needed to make a major decision. I cut that work commitment in half, and that didn't fix things....it just gave me a bit of breathing space. Fast forward to December and I made the decision to completely eliminate that stressor from my life. I knew that, during these last few months, the best I could manage exercise-wise was to walk the dogs. Once again, no guilt, shame and self-loathing attached to this postponement of commencing weight training.
Clients often think that if they are not tough on themselves they will just continue to balloon and eventually need a crane to remove them from their house. Not so. This is not a carte blanche to continue to indulge in unhealthy practices and unhelpful coping strategies. Treating yourself with kindness, understanding, respect never is. You probably wouldn't be as mean to your worst enemy as you are to yourself at times. That inner critical voice probably helped you write those new year's resolutions. Tell that voice "thank you for your input" but I've decided to focus on what's possible, not what's perfect. And go rewrite that list in a S.M.A.R.T.er way. That is
SPECIFIC - no vagueness e.g. I want to be slim - what's that?
MEASURABLE - in kilos, pounds, inches, dress size, running for buses, reducing cholesterol by x points.
ACHIEVABLE - this is the biggie - NO ONE loses 100kg in a year and keeps it off.
RELEVANT - don't sign up for singing lessons if you want to lose weight
TIME FRAMED - so that you can plan what you need to be doing this week in order to get where you want to be in 3 months time.
So this is actually a lot longer post that I intended it to be, which means that when I sit down and get thinking in front of the keyboard, stuff happens. And now with kindness, compassion, understanding and respect I will acknowledge this piece of learning and resolve to do the same thing next time I want to blog. But right now the dogs need walking.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
