It was one year ago when I launched my blog and then followed up with my new year’s resolutions. In that post, I shared new year goals of eating vegetarian 4x per week and daily yoga/meditation practice. And I managed to keep up the resolutions for the first half of the year! After that, I didn’t throw them out the window, I just wasn’t as consistent but still was at a better spot than before.
For this year, I am making short term goals to start out the year in hopes that it will build more healthy habits through the rest of the year.
I have found if I set specific goals that may be more difficult to sustain, they will still build into habits in my life to some extent. For example, when Ryan and I attempted Whole 30, we didn’t keep up the eating plan. However, we built a new habit of eating veggies and guacamole for a snack instead of crackers.
Here are my goals for the new year:
- 40 days of meditation.
- Pescatarian eating.
- Weight lifting 2x per week.
For meditation, I am planning to practice for 40 days straight.
I am choosing 40 days because that is a significant amount of days in the yogi world because it is meant to build self-discipline. 40 days also gives enough time to build positive habits in your lifestyle. For my meditation, I find a comfortable seat, usually on a pillow or my yoga bolster. This helps to lift the hips and build more comfort in the pose. I tend to play meditation playlists from Spotify and then I either repeat mantras internally or else focus on something like a stream or river. If a thought comes to mind, then it is just a leaf passing down the river and will be gone.
Next, we are going to focus on pescatarian eating this year.
Last year, it was all about vegetarian but this year we are going to expand a bit to something that is more sustainable for us. Eating pescatarian is basically eating vegetarian + seafood. We realize we will still eat other meats on occasion but are hoping to have 80%-90% of our eating to be pescatarian.
We are doing this for health and environmental reasons. Focusing on vegetarian eating promotes eating more vegetables and there isn’t a diet out there that says that’s bad. For environmental reasons, there have been many articles recently about how eating more vegetarian can help the planet. Whether you want to believe in climate change or not, eating vegetarian isn’t going to hurt! And the bonus with eating less meat is it can reduce the grocery bill….as long as we don’t start eating scallops, lobster and crab every night 🙂
My last resolution is to lift weights 2x per week.
I realize this one isn’t an extreme goal for myself as I’ve been doing this a bit for the past month or so since I got my gym membership. Next year I really want to keep it up though to build this habit. Muscles are important for the body because they make day to day tasks much easier. They also take up less space than fat and they burn more calories when you are just sitting around! Now this doesn’t mean that I want to build huge biceps or anything, I just want to have more muscles to do things like pick up my children and do a handstand.
You may be surprised that none of my resolutions are to lose “x” amount of pounds. Well, I’ve determined over the years that when I eat healthy and move my body, I don’t need to focus too much on the number on the scale. I know if I focus on lifting weights and pescatarian eating, the scale will fall into place.
However, since I did indulge a bit over the holidays (no regrets though!), we are going to start off our new year with a Kitchari cleanse. This is to help detoxify the body and reset with a short 3 day cleanse using Ayurvedic principles of eating. If you want to learn more about what we are doing, you can read it here. I am planning on doing a follow up of our cleanse later this week as we will be doing it from Jan 1st – 3rd this week.
What are your new year’s resolutions?
