2019 New Year’s Resolution Checkin — September

As I did in 2018, I’m publicly blogging about my new year’s resolutions (2019: Jan; Feb; Mar; Apr; May; June; July; Aug). For 2019, I’ve picked a single word theme: balance.

I indicated that balance was meant to encapsulate the following areas:

• Food and weight = balance means tracking and making the better choice for myself regularly ↠ Doing better. I’ve leveled off on weight gain and seem to be doing better. I have adopted a new approach to tracking my eating habits and at a minimum seem to have a bit more insight in “where it all goes wrong.”
• Exercise = balance means making it fit in my day because I feel better when I do ↠ Ongoing success and progress. I’m continuing to do the NYTimes 9min workout quite regularly and the results are getting noticed by friends and acquaintances. [Original; Cheat Sheet]
• Friends and family = balance means taking the time for them↠ Ongoing success! Compared to a hectic (but fun) July, August had a lot more downtime which was overall helpful.

Food Take Two (Three? Maybe Four?)

So the big change during August was breaking my food-related habits into four separate tasks: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. Small change, but huge mental impact and improvement.

This helped in a few key ways:

1. If I went off the rails say at lunch, then I had a chance to get back on track for dinner or prevent a snack attack.
2. But, more practically it highlighted my biggest issue: dinners and snack attacks.
3. It still felt manageable. Just four times a day, I tried to ask myself if my eating was aligned with my intentions and answer honestly. Compared to tracking—which works, but I find soul-sucking—this was much more tolerable. Like tracking, knowing I intended to write down how I would do helped.

Now though there is the gap still: food—in particular over-eating—is being used to manage stress and emotions. But I am feeling overall more optimistic about the food issues than I have for all of 2019.