I am counting Day 1 of my journey a success.
I ate 6 servings of fruits and vegetables, ran, spent 60 minutes outside in the glorious sunshine, called my grandmother, cooked dinner, had a fully productive day at work and was intentionally kind toward my husband. I also drank a bottle of pop and spent way more than 30 minutes wasting time on the internet.
Normally, when I set a goal for myself and then slip up, I tend to give up. I generalize the failure and decide that if I can't do it, I might as well not try. That's happened in the past with running, eating healthily, journaling, meditation and more other attempts than I can count. Not only do I stop working on my original goal, but I frequently swing in the entire other direction. When I make a poor choice of food after I've set out to eat healthily, I go all out and wind up like I did the other day, eating 6 packages of TastyKake Coffeecake Cream Cupcakes. If I'm not going to run, you better believe I'm going to be sitting on the couch doing nothing active at all. Naturally, this spiral winds up with me at the bottom, surrounded with cupcake wrappers, wondering what in the world happened to the reasonably intelligent, productive and well-adjusted human being I can pretend to be a majority of the time. Then I make another goal and start another cycle.
This isn't to say there haven't been times where I have successfully completed goals, of course. For better than the course of a year I either ran or went to the gym nearly every day, learning to lift weights and run long distances and enjoying the activities in the process. I was healthy. I was strong. I was proud. I completed numerous goals I set out for myself and was immensely proud of having done so. I ran a half marathon faster than I dreamed I could. I lifted my body weight over my head. I lost 25 pounds and wore a smaller size of clothes than I ever had since puberty. I was eating well, doing well and living well. Then, something changed and I stopped doing all of those things.
Now when I don't reach a goal, the failure feels even more acute. I had been successful, had managed to achieve what I set out to do, and done so with great aplomb. Instead of repeating the process, however, I'm eating cupcakes, bemoaning my increasingly larger pant size. This is the motivation behind the next four months.
I am giving myself permission to not be perfect, to have a cupcake if I want to, to fail sometimes. Nowhere in my goals is one that says I have to do everything exactly right for the next 120 days. I have permission to embrace or reject the challenges on a daily basis and work to include them in small doses, to make new habits that I can sustain for the forseeable future. This will be the ultimate outcome of this challenge.
I ate 6 servings of fruits and vegetables, ran, spent 60 minutes outside in the glorious sunshine, called my grandmother, cooked dinner, had a fully productive day at work and was intentionally kind toward my husband. I also drank a bottle of pop and spent way more than 30 minutes wasting time on the internet.
Normally, when I set a goal for myself and then slip up, I tend to give up. I generalize the failure and decide that if I can't do it, I might as well not try. That's happened in the past with running, eating healthily, journaling, meditation and more other attempts than I can count. Not only do I stop working on my original goal, but I frequently swing in the entire other direction. When I make a poor choice of food after I've set out to eat healthily, I go all out and wind up like I did the other day, eating 6 packages of TastyKake Coffeecake Cream Cupcakes. If I'm not going to run, you better believe I'm going to be sitting on the couch doing nothing active at all. Naturally, this spiral winds up with me at the bottom, surrounded with cupcake wrappers, wondering what in the world happened to the reasonably intelligent, productive and well-adjusted human being I can pretend to be a majority of the time. Then I make another goal and start another cycle.
This isn't to say there haven't been times where I have successfully completed goals, of course. For better than the course of a year I either ran or went to the gym nearly every day, learning to lift weights and run long distances and enjoying the activities in the process. I was healthy. I was strong. I was proud. I completed numerous goals I set out for myself and was immensely proud of having done so. I ran a half marathon faster than I dreamed I could. I lifted my body weight over my head. I lost 25 pounds and wore a smaller size of clothes than I ever had since puberty. I was eating well, doing well and living well. Then, something changed and I stopped doing all of those things.
Now when I don't reach a goal, the failure feels even more acute. I had been successful, had managed to achieve what I set out to do, and done so with great aplomb. Instead of repeating the process, however, I'm eating cupcakes, bemoaning my increasingly larger pant size. This is the motivation behind the next four months.
I am giving myself permission to not be perfect, to have a cupcake if I want to, to fail sometimes. Nowhere in my goals is one that says I have to do everything exactly right for the next 120 days. I have permission to embrace or reject the challenges on a daily basis and work to include them in small doses, to make new habits that I can sustain for the forseeable future. This will be the ultimate outcome of this challenge.
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