2012: end of the world or new beginning?

It's been a little quiet on this blog for the past month, so apologies for my distractedness.  December was a whirlwind month with many elves spending many hours getting ready for January (our Christmas).  I finally clocked out Friday, December 22, celebrated Christmas and got on a plan with my family for a week in Mexico.  It was a great trip, which was oddly educational.  We spent most of the time traipsing on old Mayan ruins in the Yucatan and visiting villages and cities on the Western part of this Mexican state.  After that, we had two days of R&R on the Caribbean coast.   It was an amazing trip, and there is now one more culture (the Mayan) of which I am now only mostly ignorant.

Right around 12/22, I got weighed, and I was very much at goal weight (yay me!).  From there, I had three days of Christmas merrymaking followed by seven days of Mexican/Maya cuisine -- lots of homemade tortillas and tortilla chips.  I was disallowed from exercising for SIX WHOLE DAYS.  Fate was indeed cruel.  I was not able to start getting back on physical activity until this past Saturday.  This was longest stretch without a workout in the better part of 10 months.  I was half convinced that my failure to exercise was going to accelerate the Mayan prophecy of the end of the world.

Dear Earth:  I'm sorry that my failure to
work out for six days caused a planetary event.
Will try harder next time.  

Yet, I am still breathing along with all of the other Earthlings, so I guess my lack of working out did not actually cause the planet to plunge into catastrophe.  I have not been weighed in yet, but I am guessing about a 3-5 pound gain.  Hardly another reason to predict the end of the world.

As a side note, my tour guide to the Mayan ruins informed us that the Mayans never said the world would end on Dec 21, 2012.  They merely had to reset their odometer and use it to mark a new beginning.  That sounds much more encouraging than the whole planetary destruction thing.

This vacation I did my noble best to try to force myself to disconnect from job, diet, and workout routines just a little bit.  I even managed to go a full day without having my iPhone in easy reach.  This is not small achievement for yours truly.

But now it's January, and it's time to get my game ON.

There are many who would criticize the premise of January resolutions as useless or bad.  I am not one of them.  I love treating January as the start of a new year and the opportunity for new beginnings.  I personally believe that any time we can create an internal trigger to stimulate a new behavior change effort, why not.  As long as we keep the resolution in perspective and not get down on ourselves when we don't completely change every single aspect of our lives in the course of three weeks, resolutions can be a very good prod.

So I start this new year 2012 with the best of intentions and the most positive of beliefs.  I try to keep my resolutions pretty basic, so here you go:

1. Getting my food patterns back on course.  I want to make sure that I have a good stable of menus and meal ideas as I go into the new year so I can resist the temptation to stray little-by-little into less healthy territory.  I've got my tracker out this morning, and I'm going to try to keep it out for the next few weeks.  It's a great course correction tool.
2. Continue working on my efforts not to snack after dinner.  Made good progress on this at the end of 2011, and I have a great opportunity to build on that progress.  My primary tool here will probably be some more public commitments via Twitter where I mark my progress at the end of each day for a week.  Worked great the last time I did it.  
3. Find someway to up my exercise output by 10% to 15% by adding some new activities.  Planning here is still nebulous.  

My biggest New Years resolution has nothing to do with weight.  It has to do with my outlook and what I show other people.  

My #1 2012 resolution:  smile more.  

What do you have loaded up for the new year?

Cheers,

David