My January Project

So I have struggled with what to blog about. It isn't that I really lack things to say (it has been suggested that I can be "opinionated.") It is more that I am still trying to figure out what is the right stuff to say. Blogs are so public, and yet if you go browse through what is out there they are largely personal. Anyway, this is me trying to get it right.

So what have I been doing this last month? Other than the trips to the emergency room, cleaning up after the holidays and learning to take care of a newborn all over again, I decided to get healthy. I know, it is kind of a cliche thing to do around New Years, but for me it was serious. For one, I have never seen any kind of positive will power around any diet or exercise regimine. I didn't know if I could even do it.

The New Year stated out great. I was exercising and cut my calories in half. I lost some weight and improved my lung capacity (probably not technically correct, but you get the idea). It was all going great until I got sick. It was just a little bug; I didn't even miss a day of work, but it sapped my energy so that I didn't exercise for a week, and now I am back where I started.

I have decided that this is a metaphor for life. It seems to me that one mistake in life costs ten times as much effort to get back to where you were.

Example 1: The obvious: Dieting. It is easy to fall off the wagon and have a double scoop of chocolate ice cream while watching a football game. You can clear out both scoops in under 5 minutes without even knowing that you did it, but it is a sentence of 30 minutes of hard labor to burn it off.

Example 2: Money. If I accepted every credit card offer that showed up in my mailbox in just one week I would have the ability to bury myself in debt for 20 years. And no, that wouldn't be hard to do.

Example 3: Time. If I miss one full day at work it takes me the rest of that week plus several of my own hours after work to catch up. In essence I never get days off because if I take a day off I just have to work 8 - 10 hours extra on other days. (There is a loop hole to this one though. That is to take over a week off, at which point you are so behind that you never catch up and then all you have to do is take the punishment for anything that didn't get done.)

So before I end the posting sounding all negative and stuff, I should acknowledge that my original statement is not completely true. While I do have to work on establishing my good habits of diet and exercise again, I do have the experience to know that I can do it. Previously my will-power record was probably counted in hours (<100) and now I have counted it in days. The next step will be months I suppose. In any case, while I do not relish the thought of starting over and being sore again, etc. I do appreciate the knowledge that I can do it and that will have to be enough to carry the day.

P.S. I'll let you know how it goes. Not because I think that anyone out there cares, but more because I don't know that you don't. It is free accountability.