Share Health - Better Son/Daughter

So here are some thoughts on health and New Year and resolutions.

To me a lot of New Years resolutions sound like the song Better Son/Daughter by Rilo Kiley - so much self flaggelation and must try harder and deferred happiness.  It all seems a bit much really.

This is not to say I'm not guilty of it, heck I am depply guilty of it.  Last year I set about losing weight with a (if I'm being really honest with myself) goal of doing it in time for the wedding.  So?  Well the Sunday before the wedding I was at the golden 10stone.  On the wedding day itself I was 10 stone 5.  At the end of the year I was 11 stone 6. 

Oddly I started this year at 11 stone (yes I did lose 6lbs in 3 days - no I have no idea how)

So if we go back to the post I wrote just before the new year inspired by ShareHealth and thinking about how goals really work for me, then you can see how that goal really did NOT work for me.  It was a bunch of things really.  They were as follows

• It came from a point of self hatred not a place of self love 
• It came with an end point at which point I stopped trying
• It involved heaps of self punishment and self criticism
• It involved me deferring happiness (I'll be happy once I am 10 stone)

At no point did I think about why being 10 stone would make me happy, and I am still at a loss as to how it would do that.  Really.  Still can't figure it out.

So my goals for this year are a little different.  I still have a health condition that means I should eat less chocolate, cake, red meat, pork (sigh) and hard cheese.  So I need to get back on track with that.  I still need to move more as part of the same thing, but setting arbitrary weight targets is CLEARLY not the way forward.  Hating myself is also clearly not a smart move.

So, health goals for 2013?  Walk 500 miles (totally stolen from Claire last year).  Find an exercise I really enjoy and can stick to.  Find new healthy meals I love and cook them, experiment with salads and soups, spend less time ill, sleep more, smile more, take time for me.

I've got some more specific goals within that lot, but unlike most people I do better when I keep it to myself more and tell less people.  I also do better when I enjoy what I am doing which chimes with what this study says

I'm hoping to keep posting on this theme this year - just to keep reminding myself that my health is important! And I will always try to use the hashtag #ShareHealth when I do.

I've also gone back and added all the missing links to my last post on this subject - I really don't know where they went!