Generally I’ve always been very lax about New Year’s resolutions. I tend not to make them because I don’t normally take them very seriously. A year ago, as a few friends and I waited in 2014 we had a discussion about what our plans were for the year. I listened to them and send a quiet resolve into the universe. I was going to make some resolutions and stick to them.
They looked something like this, with a few I might’ve forgotten.
- Lose weight – it’s always on the list. I think all women in the world wants to lose about 10 pounds and I was no expection. Only, I wanted to loose 20 because I was actually quite chunky.
- Live kindly – I can be an unpleasant person at the best of times, but it was my wish to really be a better person in 2014.
- Stop smoking – Err. Yes. I started. Bad 2013. Shame on you.
- Get another job – because mine was killing me.
- Work on my relationship with Other Half – speaks for itself.
Looking back, I can say with a smile that I covered most of them. I lost the 20 pounds that I wanted to loose simply by eating right. I have insulin resistance which essentially means that my body doesn’t metabolise sugar as it should. That’s really the layman’s explanation but the bottom line is that I shouldn’t eat food with a high Glucose Index. Which I did. Frequently and in excess. I tried, as every body does at some point or another, to do a “quick” diet. I tried a diet called “The Military Diet” in which you diet for 3 days on a very strict program and then eat as you want for the next four. They claim that it works on enzymes and metabolism and all of these impressive sounding explanations but the truth is that for the three days, you consume less than half of the calories that your body needs to keep itself going. Your essentially slowly starving yourself and THAT did not work out. I went back to basics, went to see a professional dietician and did some exercise.
And I lost weight.
The unbendable fact about losing weight is that there is NO EASY FIX. We all want to lose weight by simply sitting on the couch and doing nothing but you know what. That’s never going to work. EVER.
And I’m fulfilling my second resolution by simply telling you this out of kindness.
I did really well with THAT resolution this year. whistles and looks the other way
But, I did stop smoking. It wasn’t easy, even though I wasn’t a very serious smoker, I was one out of habit. And, I’ll be the first to confess that I LOVE smoking. I like the habit of it, the way you can comfortably leave a conversation with the excuse that you need to go for a smoke. I like how you can pause your thoughts, or let it go. I didn’t like the way I smelled, but that didn’t really stop me. The need to get life insurance however did and money, or rather, paying a lower premium, was a very good incentive to let my little cancer sticks go.
I did get another job, but I’ll elaborate on that in my “Experience” posts as it needs some explanation.
And – a year later Other Half and I are not only celebrating 7 years together already, but we also finally bought a house. It’s a very new and exciting step in our relationship. It’s development, it’s commitment on paper. And it’s something that’s been long overdue.
So all in all, I think I did well. I worked at it, I worked at it all the time but it paid off.
I have high hopes for this year. I think that 2015 is going to be whopper. Tough yes, with new experiences and pressures, but I want it to be about growth in my professional life, my personal relationships and even my writing. The only resolution that I do have is to have a working manuscript of my original novel. It doesn’t have to be good, but it has to be finished, I can edit and work on it later. The thing what I learned through my resolutions is that whatever I want as a person, I really have to work to achieve myself. And if I don’t start – if I don’t get up early in the morning for my run, if I don’t sit down and write a paragraph or I put down the chocolate that mysteriously slipped into my shopping bag, I won’t succeed. People can support me yes, but I have to make a decision to pursue my goals.
And, I think it’s the same for all of us. We like to think that we can succeed by taking the easy way out but the truth is that there is no such thing. There is simply a varying degree of determination to succeed. We’re all struggling, we’re all having a hard time. I read a friend’s blog before starting this one and I realised and remembered that despite our ‘uniqueness’ we are all the same because we are all fighting the same battle with ourselves. So, to come back to that second resolution that I perhaps neglected to pursue as hard as I should’ve, I would like to remind you and myself, that we have to be kind. That 2015 promises to be better and worse and faster than 2014 and it will be what we make of it.
And what we make of ourselves.
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