New Year's Resolutions 2012

1. Eat healthier.

Although this past summer and fall semester I've worked hard toward eating healthier, I really could have done better. There have been a lot of instances where I've made excuses such as "There's nothing good for dinner so I might as well have fries" or "I'm so stressed, I really need to eat a candy bar or two or three..." My goal therefore is to not only eat healthier by not eating fries or desert in the school cafeteria, but to also refrain from eating unhealthy food, especially sweets, in my suite as well. I've always had a big problem with self control, but hopefully I'll be able to work on reining myself in more this year.

2. Exercise daily.

Again, I've worked really hard on staying in shape this past summer and fall semester after gaining the freshman 15 last year. From August to December I ran three days a week and also went to the gym, walked around Colchester, Winooski, and Burlington with friends or solo, and did some yoga with Denise Austin. However, I also found myself making lots of excuses not to exercise, hence I stopped exercising on the weekends once October came along and only did my yoga DVD twice. My new goal is to stop making excuses by exercising daily. This goal is inspired by an article I read in a health magazine a few months ago. The article said that those who exercise daily find less opportunities to make excuses not to exercise because they've scheduled time to perform this task. I know it's going to be tricky the first couple of weeks of spring semester to work out a schedule for myself, but hopefully by the end of January I'll find an exercise schedule that works for me!

Another component of the goal is mixing up my exercise. I know another big problem for me is that I get bored very easily. Running is the one form of exercise I absolutely love to do but even running the same route feels repetitive after a month or two. I'm hoping that I can solve this problem by running 3 or 4 days a week but choosing different routes and/or mediums (indoor vs outdoor, treadmill vs running track). For example, if I decide to run Monday, Wednesday, Friday like I did last semester, perhaps I could run on the treadmill for 1-3 miles on Monday, on the indoor track on Wednesday, and outside to North campus and back on Friday. I also want to alternate running workouts with lifting, Zumba, or yoga classes to not only mix things up but also to give me a different workout to look forward to each day. One neat app I'm going to try is the "Nike Training Club" app. This app is like having your own personal trainer in the palm of your hand! I know another one of my many problems is that I never know what exercises to do. Hopefully this app will both educate me on some cool, effective, easy exercises and inspire me to get my butt to the gym everyday!

3. Replace the word "hate" with the word "dislike."

One thing I've observed over the last few weeks is how much I say the word "hate." The word hate is such a negative word, though, and has a very extreme meaning. I've also observed that when I use the word hate, ninety-nine percent of the time I actually mean that I dislike something. For example, after this summer one phrase I said constantly was "I hate working." In this case, I don't intensely or passionately dislike working, there are just things I'd rather do like read a book for fun or watch TV. Therefore, in order to work toward being more positive, I'm going to work on replacing the word hate with the word dislike.