Didja watch the video from yesterday? We worked pretty hard on it but hope to do better as time goes on. Just like the Zoom choral pieces I just about tore my hair out over for my choir’s online Christmas concert—I almost gave up on those but persevered. Now I’m looking forward to our spring concert and its new challenges. Same with videos for this site, which will include some v-e-r-y s-i-m-p-l-e demos from the upcoming cookbook. So stick around!
Anyway, I emphasized in the video how important it is to form permanent, longstanding habits that have no finish line. Doing a short-term “challenge” is pretty useless. You go on some extreme, short-term diet and lose a lot of weight, but then you just go back to eating the way you did to cause the need for weight loss in the first place. So what was the point? You’re probably worse off than before, since you would have lost muscle mass but regained fat tissue.
At some point I started doing these easy exercises, saying that I needed to do them three times a week. The abdominal ones, which are featured in the video, came from a book on the importance of your core. The others are from varied sources: I do a set that I was given while going through physical therapy for bursitis in my hip, a set from the old book Callanetics, and some wussy girly pushups. (Ahem. Some “knee pushups.”) I can only do around 12 of that last one. Over five years ago I wrote a post about setting a goal of doing 20 of them. Did that ever happen? Nah. Doing 12, without collapsing on the floor several times, is fine. And by the way—why did I get back into doing the pushups, since I hate and despise them so much? I wanted to get rid of my arm batwings. There’s been a little bit of improvement there, so vanity should help me keep going.
In addition to the floor exercises I’m trying to be more consistent about going on walks, as I mention in the video. Four times a week is my goal; last week I did that, although I cheated a bit on the length of the fourth time as I did only 15 minutes on the treadmill. I hate the treadmill! So I wimped out a bit there. Today it’s almost 60 degrees and absolutely beautiful, perfect walking weather which I took advantage of this morning. That makes two walks this week.
One other small-but-doable goal: cleaning up the kitchen every single night. How many times have I said I was going to start doing this? About a hundred. It’s so depressing to get up in the morning to a messy kitchen, and it seems to take twice as long to do the cleanup then than it would in the evening. I had planned to make this a Jan. 1 resolution but at some point in the last week of December I just said to myself one night, ‘Hey, just get this cleaned up now! It’ll only take about 15 minutes.’ That little push has morphed into something lasting. (Hey—maybe three weeks. We’ll take it!)
So I’d encourage you to make your own small, permanent changes. Do what you can within your “circle of control.”