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Archive for the 'New Years Resolutions' Category

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Reevaluating Your New Year’s Resolution – One Month Later – Are You Successful at following it?

The Party’s Over – It’s New Years Resolution Time!

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Reevaluating Your New Year’s Resolution – One Month Later – Are You Successful at following it?

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

Have you been following your New Year’s Resolutions successfully? This year, mine concerned taking better care of myself and my family: Trying to fit in more exercise and to improve our diets. Not easy when you have two fussy kids and an even fussier husband!

Well here we are, a month later, so it’s time for a reality check. If you made any resolutions, this might be a good time for you to assess your progress as well. What’s gone well and what hasn’t? Even if you’ve failed to keep your promises to yourself, it’s not too late! You can still put a new plan into action to make the positive changes in your life that you wanted to make last month.

My first resolution was to start an exercise regime. This went pretty well.

One of my challenges was to fit a workout into the busy schedule of a Mom with school age kids. We’re always running to one place or another for different events our children are involved in. All that chauffeuring doesn’t leave much time for physical fitness. So to start, I set the modest goal of working out for a half hour every other day. Even busy moms can generally fit thirty minutes into their crowded schedule every two days.

I chose to use exercise videos since it eliminated all of the extra time spent getting to and from a gym. Also, working out indoors got rid of bad weather being a deterrent to exercising. I bought Leslie Sansone’s Walk Away the Pounds – 5-Day Fit Walk on DVD. It has 5 different workouts which adds variety to the exercise week. (I got the DVD at my local Target store for about $15.00.)

I’ve been pretty good about keeping up with it, but I haven’t been perfect. A couple of times, I let 2 days go in between workouts, but I decided I wouldn’t let that small failure stop the regime and I went right back to it. The most important thing is to keep exercising throughout the year.

It’s also important not to let yourself get bored. I can already tell that I will have to invest in more DVD’s to keep my interest up.

My second resolution was to cook healthier meals for my family and my third was to try to lose weight. Of course, these are closely related.

The good news is, I’ve successfully lost 5 pounds! Once again, with weight loss, the important point was to stick with it.

Rick Gallop, who created the Glycemic Index Diet, says that it’s not realistic to expect to stay on your diet more than 90% of the time. This philosophy helps you be more human about the whole process. Everyone will have events they go to where they can’t totally control the food they eat. Or it may just be a special occasion where you want to treat yourself. If you allow yourself to go off your regime 10% of the time, it makes it easier to stay on the diet the other 90%.

Also, if you fall off the wagon for a couple of days in a row, don’t crucify yourself for it. Just decide that the past is the past and go back to where you left off.

There are tricks to losing weight. One is that you have to find something that works for you. If you’re really not liking the diet you’re on, try another one. What I like about the diet I’m on, the Glycemic Index Diet, is that you don’t have to starve yourself. So it’s realistic to fit into real life. Starvation diets never work long-term. The focus of the Glycemic Index Diet is to change the way you eat for life.

I’d like to address the subject of cooking healthy food for your family in a separate post – as I have many ideas to float around and this fits in nicely with the topic of preparing healthy foods for kids while they’re at school – which I’d like to address too.

I hope that all of you who made New Year’s Resolutions are having success with them! Feel free to share your experiences with us, if you’d like, in the comments below.

-Mama Lisa

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Posted in Countries & Cultures, Food and Nutrition, Holidays Around the World, Mama Lisa, New Years, New Years Resolutions, Parenting, USA | No Comments »

The Party’s Over – It’s New Years Resolution Time!

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

It’s the first week of January, so it’s not too late to start, or even to make, a New Year’s Resolution. I’m trying to make ones that are realistic and that I can stick to. I recommend built in checks over time to make sure you’re sticking to it.

My first resolution is to restart an exercise regime. I’d rather not go to a gym that’s costly and takes up extra time getting there and back. So I’m giving myself one month to get a home work-out routine going with DVD’s. If by February 1st I’m not sticking to the schedule, then I’ll have to join a gym. This way there’s a built in check and motivation – I’d rather not go to a gym!

My second resolution is to cook healthier meals for my family. An important part of parenting is to make sure your kids eat right. The idea is to really change the way we eat. I’d like to consistently choose multigrain products over processed foods. A good step to improve our diets would be eliminating the high-sugared cereals that my kids con me into buying every other week. Cutting red meat consumption down to small portions only once or twice a week is also important. Increasing fruit and vegetable consumption is key. Finding ways to make these changes part of the family menu will improve our health as a group.

My third resolution is to lose some weight. With this goal in mind, I’ve been reading a book that my doctor recommended that’s called The Glycemic Index Diet by Rick Gallop. He lays out in simple terms issues like what types of fats are good for you (which is also helping me with my 2nd resolution). Gallop discusses the virtues of choosing foods that your body takes a longer time to break down – like multigrains. He recommends, for weight-loss, that half of each meal be vegetables or fruits, a quarter be protein like meat or fish (though I’ll focus on beans in that category) and the other quarter be grains. This is what I’m going to try to follow for myself to lose some weight.

If you’ve made a New Year’s Resolution, you may want to consider how you can put it into effect in practical ways to be able to achieve it. Build in a check system to make sure you’re following through. Checking back on February 1st is a good start.

Good luck with your Resolution! If you have other ideas for sticking to your plans, feel free to let us know about it in the comments below.

Lisa

UPDATE: Come read about what’s happening 1 month later – some tips to sticking with your New Year’s Resolution – I’m happy to report that I lost 5 pounds in a month!

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Posted in Countries & Cultures, Food and Nutrition, Holidays Around the World, Mama Lisa, New Years, New Years Resolutions, Parenting, USA | No Comments »

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