Half way through the year already, and it seemed like a good time to look back at my New Year resolutions.
I’m not normally one for resolutions, but avoiding them hadn’t exactly been a winning strategy either, so I thought I’d give them a try. As I said in January:
Given that I remain unfit and overweight, and have spent the last 4 years trying a variety of different approaches, none of which have worked, I’m thinking that maybe I should just try New Year resolutions? What’s the harm, right? If nothing else, it’s a time-based reset that I can use to start something new, how strongly I am resolved to ‘complete’ it is an entirely other matter.
The Resolution
The goal: A visible change in my body shape by the end of April.
I used AI to generate me some workouts using the weight machines, headed to the local gym, got going and I am delighted to report that….
There is no discernible change in my body shape.
What went wrong
Nothing really, just an accumulation of life:
- I was ill through most of January with a persistent cough which rendered walking up one flight of stairs at home ‘exercise’.
- Our Mini Cooper, our second car, was written off after an asshole ran me off the road, making it a little harder to get to the gym.
- Workload ramped up, and so I spent more time sitting/standing and just felt stuck in that slump.
- I spent some time trying to work out why I kept falling back into the same cycle.
And yes, I am aware that some of these are more excuse than reason.
Regardless, I missed the April target. Admittedly this was arbitrary but still felt far enough away that I’d have made a little progress. Oh well.
Looking back, perhaps I was measuring the wrong thing. The scales and the mirror haven’t changed much, but my habits have. I’m moving more often and more regularly than I had been, which can only be a good thing for my future self.
Timing Matters
This is why I’ve held no truck with resolutions. They presume a lot of things will fall into place, including motivation, without any real notion of how things will play out. My 100 days approach (currently on Day 42) was planned BECAUSE I had motivation sitting there and had already given myself a kick; adding the 100 Days goal just gave me more of an incentive for something that was already bubbling away in my brain.
Maybe the lesson isn’t that New Year resolutions don’t work. Maybe it’s that they only work if they happen to coincide with the moment you’re actually ready to change. Mine didn’t.
So, resolutions be damned. From here on I’m going to let my own motivation dictate the timing, rather than the arbitrary turning of the calendar.
What are your thoughts?