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