Today is January First

I heard a a great podcast this morning about the harm of an "All or Nothing Approach towards Fitness and Weight Loss" and I want to steal a couple of his ideas. But since I'm giving credit, I'm not really stealing them.

He perfectly describes my whole approach to LIFE, which includes everything. I'm an all or nothing person and an all or nothing thinker. But the harm in that is that more often it is nothing than all.

I would diet and blow it -- and then say, "OH well, I had fries for lunch, might as well get a chocolate shake at supper" and then the next day it would be "yesterday I had fries and a shake, so I guess today I can do it again. I guess that diet is over." ANd that is how you end up with a 6 year weight loss chart that looks like this one. Either I was dieting, or I wasn't.

Same thing with exercise. If I had momentum going, I could keep going no matter what. But if I skipped a day, or a couple days, then I didn't go back to the Y for months.

I have often believed that every day is a new day ... and that we start fresh, but I liked the idea that every day is January first. We can start new and begin again.

I realized on my way home from the Y that I was doing the same thing with my monthly resolutions for June that I came up with the end of May. There have been a few days this month that I haven't written anything and some days when I haven't kept up with my water intake.

And I embarrassingly confess to you that I concluded that it didn't really matter. I would just stop trying, wait until the end of the month, confess to you that I hadn't done it every day, make some new ones for July and move on.

Today I realized that if I did that I would be wasting 7 days of drinking enough water, and 7 days of writing a paragraph. And how dumb is that?

The all or nothing approach is such a mind game and it gets us nowhere.

So, today on my way back from the YMCA I drank 24 of my 64 ounces already. And I'm planning to write something today.

Did you make a new month's resolution? It isn't too late to make a June one. Every single good choice counts. That's what I'm learning. And so if it is a week, a month, or a day that I do the right things, it matters.

I am going to add something new in July, but before July gets here, I'm getting back on track for June.