Pressing the Reset Button

I’ve spent the last couple of days really thinking myself into how I want things be after January 1. I’m setting myself up so that I have maximum motivation and every opportunity to do this right, so I’ve given my blog a facelift, set myself up a new spreadsheet for tracking my losses, reactivated my Weight Watchers food tracker and to make things even more interesting have set myself a lower target. What am I going to do differently to the past couple of months? Well for the past two months I’ve been struggling with undiagnosed (despite a huge round of blood tests) constant muscular pain in my back – still none the wiser as to what it is/was but it does seem to be gradually improving. But while this was at it’s worst I stopped walking and generally fed my face on whatever I felt like – poor me I’m not well kind of thing! Then of course there’s the alcohol – back to having several glasses of wine every night. And then there was Christmas. So the plan going forward is: Alcohol – after New Year’s Eve there will be a long dry spell till Easter. I definitely lose better and sleep better when I do without. But there’s another reason – there have been a couple of occasions in the past 12 months when I’ve gone to the doctor’s and my blood pressure has been on the high side. Every piece of research on hypertension cites alcohol as a highly probable contributing cause – especially drinking as much as I do. I’ve bought myself a BP monitor and will watch how it performs during the abovementioned dry spell and see if there is an improvement. Exercise – commit to walking at least four nights a week – more if I can manage it and look seriously at getting back to the gym – a tricky one since it’s so hard to find the time to get there and walk too but I did manage it for a while so will see if I can shuffle things around and make it back there. This will probably help my back too. Tracking – I pay $24 a month for WW online so I’m going to use it properly. Revised Target – I think that because I nearly get there I slacken off when I’m close to it and I’m settling for less than I should. So I’m going to try to push myself harder with a harder target and see if that’ll get me really going – sounds a bit crackpottish but we’ll see. Carrots – I’ve just booked flights for Bloss and I to go to Hong Kong in May so there’s carrot no 1 and then we plan to go to the States and Mexico in September so there’s carrot no 2. A loss of 15 kgs in 8 months should be achievable. I apologise to everyone for just dropping out of the blog circuit – not sure what happened – went on holiday – came back to a new focus I guess and just couldn’t get back to it. Mind you I’ve still been popping in to check on you all from time to time,, so hope you’ll forgive me and welcome me back to the fold!! I know that last year when I was blogging regularly, getting feedback from you guys and following your progress, I did some very clever things.