10 days into the new year and I’m surrounded by people attempting to keep their new year’s resolutions and live a ‘healthier’ lifestyle. Everywhere you look, their are ads for diets, gyms and quick fixes to help you attain that ideal physique.
Take my office for example. I work at a small firm where almost everyone who works there is male. Since January 3rd, all except a couple of men in the office have been on some sort of diet, with the most popular being a liquid diet. The most interesting liquid dieting being the one where you drink 8 different types of juices a day and those drinks are supposed to give you all the nutrients you need for the day. That’s it – just juice, no solids. You’re drinking everything from fruit and veggie blends to the all popular coconut water, which tastes awful and is not more hydrating than water. Now, I’m not a scientist, but when you have men who are used to eating large, filling meals of burgers and fries or chicken and rice plates from the Halal carts (aka street meat) and they switch to a liquid diet, you’re going to have a few unhappy campers as their bodies adjust. Last week you should have seen this place – you would have thought I worked in an office full of women – moody, temperamental and on edge men filled their desks. This behavior was coming from guys who sit around and talk about who can do the most push-ups, with some guys claiming they can do 500 (ha!) to challenging each other in the boxing ring when they have a disagreement and feel then need to show how masculine they are. Those arguements typically go something like this:
Guy #1: “Let’s take this to the ring. Put on some gloves and we’ll see how many rounds you can last.”
Guy #2: “You couldn’t last one round with me!”
Guy #1: “I’d knock you out first. I used to box in high school.”
Guy #2: “You’d last like 1 minute against me. I bet you can’t even handle the speed bag.”
Guy #1: “I use that at the gym.”
You get the picture. After being around this neurotic and narcissistic behavior for too long and in an attempt to not disappoint myself this year, I am not making any new year’s resolutions. Let’s face it, a week into January I was still noshing on some Christmas candy, so if I had vowed to cut out sugar from my diet I would have already epically failed. Although I am cutting back on caffeine and alcohol consumption, I am doing so not as a new year’s resolution, but to help me with my running. Instead of unrealistic resolutions, I have decided to make this year my ‘year of dabbling’ by learning new things I’ve always thought were interesting or doing things I love and have not made time for in the recent years. Some of these things include:
- speaking french
- painting
- hot yoga/yoga in general
- running races [as it’s been an entire year since my last one]
- zumba
- photography [esp. black and white]
- reading
- cooking [afterall, I need to try all those recipes I’ve pinned on pinterest]
- hiking
The difference between what I am doing and what the 99.99% do, is that I am not setting a goal to complete [insert unrealistic resolution here]. Instead, I’ll do as little or as much of everything as I want. So, if I only learn 10 words in French, well guess what, that’s 10 words I didn’t know before, so kudos to me. I refuse to be dissapointed by things I don’t accomplish this year. I’ll try hard and do what I want/can.
Cheers to my anti-resolutions.
julieupclose 