The title of this post is actually from a song on the second Dr. Demento’s Christmas album, “Doctor Demento: Holidays in Dementia,” this song “New Year’s Resolutions” sung by “Scary Gary Alan,” to the tune of, “Auld Lang Syne.” I grew up with these Dr. Demento CDs because my dad would play them during lab parties when I was in my formative, teenage years.
I used to do the New Year’s Resolutions (NYR) thing, and I have had some fitness success with them, but that quickly faded. There is some research to suggest that up to 40% of NYR succeed, but I haven’t seen any research that tries to separate them by difficulty. And, let’s face it: Making a fairly significant life change – altering your relationship with food and exercise – is a pretty difficult thing to do.
There’s a reason why gyms / fitness centers have such big deals around January 1: They can sign a lot of people up, at a discount to their normal fees, and when the majority bail after a month or so, they get hit with penalties to pull out of the year-long contract. Similarly, those of us who might want to buy home gym equipment, only mildly used, know to start looking at Craigslist around February/March. And I might need to get me a new elliptical this year.
Anyway, I haven’t tried to tie fitness to January 1st in many years (over a decade, I think?), because of that. I’m thinking, though, I might try some organizational NYRs. Some ideas I’m tossing around:
- Laundry will be put away within 24 hours of coming out of the washing machine.
- The boyfriend and I will set aside X hours on a TBD date every week, that we’ll be consistent with (we just haven’t decided how long or what day), when we will do stuff around the house that we’ve been putting off. Like, moving computer equipment, doing laundry, cleaning the bathroom, etc.
- With that idea, I’m looking into, instead of having regimented time/duration per day for some things (like taking care of the plants, or trying to do some housework), I’ll have an amount of time per week, and once I’ve used that, I don’t have to do any more, or I shouldn’t do any more. For instance, I consume a lot of news, and it’s depressing (these days) and very time-consuming. So, I could limit myself to no more than 1 hour per day, which must be double-counted even when doing other things like eating (so 30 minutes eating and reading the news counts 30 minutes against my hour for news). Obviously, some exceptions must be in place, like company visiting (when we’re done with COVID) would mean more cleaning of the house that week. I’m also annoyed with how much I spend cooking sometimes, so I’m considering putting a cap on that and working that into my weekly meal planning.
So, the point of those is that, if I fail, it’s no biggie, it just didn’t work out. But, they are things I’d like to try. In the past, I’ve done a NYR where I would respond to one embarrassingly overdue email per week. Got over that in about 2 months. I did another one one year where I would try making one new dinner recipe per month, for I was in a pretty set routine with little variety and the boyfriend was complaining about too many stir fries. I think I ended up with 7 new things that year, and now with COVID, I definitely have a set rotation based on the every-five-weeks grocery shopping.
Anyway, that’s my NYR post, next up, an examination of what I accomplished in 2020 on my fitness journey.
