July Goals

I think it's important to have goals. It gives you a specific road to follow and that makes it much easier to keep on target. You can track your progress much more easily.

Since my end goal is very nebulous – be fit – I want to map out specific goals to make it a little more concrete. Among other reasons to have concrete goals, it's much easier for my husband to praise and encourage me if there is quantitative evidence that I'm doing better (and I need that positive reinforcement).

I'm also a fan of an idea posed over at unclutterer.com: make mini goals to be accomplished on a monthly basis instead of a large goal to be accomplished over a year. Or, if you must have a large goal, break it up into smaller steps that can be accomplished during a month.

I'm starting this part way into July, so these goals, though still very important, are going to be a little bit lighter than the goals that I will end up with later in the year.

I will have at least two goals a month – one geared towards nutrition, one geared towards exercise – though, my guess is that I will usually have three. I'm going to try to limit it to no more than four so that I can really focus on getting them all done. I will allow four because I'm not trying to complete any other goals in my life. This is my first priority.

Nutrition: Track what I'm eating. I can't effectively balance my diet if I don't know the nutritional content of what I eat on a regular basis. In addition to tracking calories/carbs/protein/fats, I will be tracking water intake, sodium, fiber, caffeine, calcium and iron. There are a number of other things that I could track, but I don't want to make myself insane. These are the ones that I have dubbed most important to me at this point in my life. I know that I will eventually get more vitamins and minerals as I vary my diet and eat better, so I choose to just not worry about this other stuff until I have tackled other, more important items.

As a sub goal on this, I will try not to feel down on myself when I don't have particularly healthy days, or even weeks. The purpose of this month is to track what I eat so that I know how to balance my diet, not to track my food and feel so badly about how I am currently that I either eat for comfort or stop tracking altogether. I'm not sure how I will do on this, but I need to try.

Fitness: Do something, anything, that counts as a healthy activity, totaling 3 hours/week. These are likely to be gentle activities that can be modified to meet my level of fitness, like yoga, walking and swimming.

Miscellaneous: Try to figure out how I can keep these two goals when my life gets busy. I can't count on a regularly scheduled time to be able to exercise or track what I eat, so I would like to know what contingency plans are in place when I don't have enough time to do one of these. As a bonus mission for this goal, I'm going to try to figure out how much volunteer time is a reasonable amount – allows me to get out of the house and be involved, without taking up so much time that it interferes with my goals. This determination will be mostly through observation, I think.