Since I started January without extremely hard and firm “goals” fully sketched out, I spent most of the month not really stressing about trying to do anything in particular. I had a few things in my mind that I was kind of focusing on, but a full on New Years Revolution- no.
My one big focus was eating a vegetable at every meal I control. (I talked about this in a previous post.)
I think I did well with this! I actually did not track this– I know, crazy, because I love tracking things. But I just have worked to really keep it front of mind. Amazingly, when you set less goals, you maybe actually have a higher likelihood of actually achieving the one you set!!! hahaha!!
I don’t think I’ve been 100%, and I’ve been pretty loose on what I consider “a meal I control” (we do eat out/ take out quite often- so, those meals tend to be a free for all for me. I mean, it’s not like I couldn’t “control” those meals and choose more healthfully from restaurants- I just don’t want to/don’t care.)
But all in all, this little rule has been quite easy to implement, and it feels like a win. They say in health related changes, it is best to focusing on ADDING good things versus trying to SUBTRACT “bad” things…and then let the good stuff crowd out the bad. I like it.
My second big focus was getting back to a regular exercise routine. The holiday season was pretty iffy around here for exercise. I really just wanted to get back to a normal feeling exercise routine, which for me, would be regular strength training (aiming 3x/ week in the gym) and some home workouts (primarily cardio/ core/ full body workout). And I have! Our Mexico trip kind of screwed up the middle of the month and I was slow to get back on the horse after we got home (we got home on a Tuesday night, and I basically gave myself a free pass to not restart exercise until the following Monday! Oops.)
But before and after that 12 day stretch off (😆), I’ve been ON my game. So, good enough.
I also do track my walks, but the weather has been COLD. I just have not been feeling outdoor walks right now! I’ve done some walks on the track at the gym, and a few treadmill walks, but this wasn’t a primary focus I guess this month.
Other Numbers:
I did tally up some of my categories. Another/ 3rd area of focus is that I really want to be 100% on my tracking logs!! I don’t mean I have to DO all the things on there at 100%, but I just want to mark off the boxes every single day. (In 2021 I had some big stretches with missing data….and as someone who works with data everyday, I can tell you this makes the overall numbers fairly useless!!!).
Read: 21/31
Walk: 12/31
Workout: 14/31 (remember- 12 day stretch off in the middle! So let’s say 14/19.)
Yoga/Stretch: 2/31
Read with kids: 1/31 (ohhhh…that’s low. But a new stack of books about ROME just arrived yesterday!! So we are going to start reading those together!)
Skincare: 28/31
I track a few other things like flossing, gratitude (I do this instinctively now but I still track it…why? I dunno. An easy A+, I guess. 🙂 )
I also track my social media minutes. This is probably info for another post, but my January numbers were BAD. Well, I guess I’ll just hide this down at the bottom of this post, and maybe people have stopped reading by now and won’t even see it….hehehe….. but I broke this way down, and I totaled 1,537 minutes of either FB/IG time in January!! This averages out to 49.6 minutes per day, or….wait for it…..25.6 HOURS. Excuse me while I go throw up. 🤢🤢
25.6 hours. (In fairness- there were some large outliers, like from when I was posting vacation pics or videos of the kids, which always lead to comments (and then going back more to read/ respond) and things like that.) But holy moly, I just don’t love that number!!!
More to come. I’m still not feeling like I want to fully pull the plug or go crazy and throw my iPhone out the moving car window… but I have an idea (part of my 22 for 2022) for experimenting with different social media usage options in a regimented trial/error fashion. More on this later.
Thought of the Day:
Those who are busy planting love don’t have time to throw stones. – Saint Dulce
Daily Gratitude:
I am grateful for a really good episode of This is Us last night! The first few of this new season were still very good, but they were more of the “flashback” type episodes. You know, where they like zoom in on some moment in the past, and do a deep dive into resolving that for the ENTIRE episode. Which is okay, and I still really liked them, but my favorites are when it’s more “present day”, with just a few flashbacks thrown in.
GRATEFUL KAE 
I need to watch that episodes! still figuring out how to watch HBO from the Philippines.
what do you eat for breakfast that include vegetables? I’m curious to see.
I also consume more social media on vacation…. and I don’t think it’s bad. When I think about social media consumption, it’s more about whether I’m in control or social media is controlling me. I’ve tried few times to cut it and I succeeded without much effort so I felt I was in control and that gave me peace of mind. When I’m busy with work and life, social media consumption goes down, when I am on vacation it goes up so I think it’s fine. but I’m curious to hear about your new idea.
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Vacations always throw months off and you take them so infrequently that I think you should take them out of the calculation for % of days you worked out, etc! Gosh the social media minutes can be a brutal calc, can’t it? I was limiting myself to 20 min/day between FB/IG. It seemed like not much, but when I did the math, that added up to 10 hours/month. So that is part of why I’m off social media indefinitely… Overall my feeling after being on social media is not great. It’s a comparison trap for me at times and I just don’t feel like I was connecting in a high quality way. We’ll see if I stay off forever or not? The longer I’m away, the less I miss it! I haven’t blogged about this yet but my word for 2022 is connection so I am focusing on connecting people in a more meaningful and fulfilling way – which is also more work than scrolling FB/IG. But even if I schedule 4 zooms/FaceTimes with friends, that’s about 1/2 of the time I spent on social media but way more fulfilling and meaningful.
I’ve been tracking # of days when steps were > 10k and # of workouts. I only include runs and beach body workouts as workouts – so not walks, sledding w/ kids, etc. I’m starting to graph out my numbers in my W222 so I can get a sense for trends. January was so bad since I was sick for a good chunk of the month. So I only worked out 11 days and got more than 10k steps on 13 days. I almost always hit the 10k+ mark on weekends so at least we are active when we are spending time with our kids. But I really hope those numbers improve – but I need to be healthier!
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