2014 will be the year. Lots of people say that every new year, but one time it has to be THE ONE, and 2014 for me will be that ONE.
I decided to make it easier to keep some of those resolutions that always go wrong within hours or days of January 1st, so I ate some of the most godawful cafeteria food, wore some of the clothes that make me look fat, made a note of how many steps it took to get me winded and comparison shopped for fitness equipment at Five Below (they have resistance bands for five bucks).
Now I am ready to quit eating, exercise and lose some weight.
My food portion sizes will fit on a teacup saucer. The contents of that saucer will be primarily veggies, with a smattering of starch and protein to make it look appetizing. My ketchup is already free of high fructose corn syrup, and I rarely touch the salt shaker, so the next step should be easy, right?
To fill in the time I will gain by eating less, I have a project a day lined up for me to do: writing (always), crochet and felting. As for the latter, I’ve found a wonderful UTube tutorial which will teach me to make wonderful poseable animals from fluffy wool, some wire armature and a lethal-looking barbed needle which one uses to inflict multiple injuries to the fibers to tangle them into solid matter. As I poke away at the wool, I can recall people who have caused me to lose my temper, or I can think about all the terrible stories on CNN, which blares constantly in the cafeteria at work while I’m trying to enjoy my food (which will now come in a saucer sized portion).
I have a walking program lined up. I will get out and walk a bit every day. This will make up for the time I sit glued to my chair waiting for the once yearly phone call from the company CEO, when I can explain that my boss is in a meeting at another location and can he return the call. If I do this for my two ten-minute breaks a day, that will be 100 minutes of exercise a week. Not bad for the girl who never could run and, in the old days when school children could run around the school building without fear of interference from the outside world, she usually finished steps ahead of the chronically obese kids in the class. Funny thing is I’m not really out of shape: I just never could run, so walking is the thing for me.
Last year at this time, I had lost fifteen pounds to stress. Once the stress ended, I gained it back. The key was to eat lots of soup. Unfortunately soup does not fit on a saucer well.
Maybe I should just resolve to write more. I could exercise more by going back and forth to the mailbox looking for responses to query letters and live off ramen noodles to lose weight. I could be in a size six by Valentine’s Day!
Susan's Scribblings the Blog 