New Year, New Me! Just kidding, I fucking hate that shit.

I’m not much of a New Year’s resolutions person.  It seems like the more build-up you give something you want to do or change, the more it becomes an event rather than something permanent.  I also find that people that get really into New Year’s resolutions are the type that I usually want to stab in the face.  All the same, January 2 happens to be the first day of normalcy after a month-plus of cookies and candy, peppermint everything, Christmas parties, New Year’s parties, etc. so I usually find myself trying to be a little more on my shit for a few weeks than I was in the weeks prior.

My roommate is doing a 3-day juice cleanse which I briefly considered joining her in, because every time I’m coming out of a vacation, holiday, or other occasion where I’ve been subsisting on Doritos and beer for 48+ hours I feel like I should jump to the other extreme and starve myself into submission.  But then I remember all of the other times I’ve done stupid crap like that in my life and how totally unhelpful it is, and how much I don’t want to drop a hundo to be a miserable bitch for a few days, and I’m like fine, I’ll do it the old fashioned way and just go back to my usual WW way of life.  I mean, it’s only been 2.5 days since I tracked and went to the gym, I think I can remember how that stuff works.

Anyway, in the spirit of still trying to make a more focused effort on eating healthily and tracking and all that good stuff, I decided to do a 14-day... we’ll call it a purification.  It doesn’t involve juice or shakes or undereating or overexercising or really anything else stupid, I just wanted to give it a fun name.  And it does involve massively decreasing my alcohol and junk food intake for 2 weeks so that ought to purify me at least somewhat.  Basically I just wrote down a few principles I’d like to focus on for the next 2 weeks.  They’re all things I should be doing anyway but a little stricter than I normally roll.  So, here goes, listed in the order of difficulty I perceive them being:

1. Track everything, every day- this one should be easy, I do this 90% of the time anyway but that means none of those lazyass days where I forget/skip.

2. Work out 4 times each week- again, this one should be easy since I go 3-4 times every week anyway, but for at least the 2 next weeks I’m making an effort to not skip that 4^th one because I want to go home and binge-watch Game of Thrones.  Even though I do want to do that.

3. No scale for 2 weeks- this one isn’t really that important but I figure if I’m making other positive changes it wouldn’t kill me to take a brief scale hiatus also.  And I know when I’m on more on my WW game, I’m tempted to check the scale more frequently.

4. At least 5 servings of fruits and veggies and 2 servings of dairy every day- this goes hand in hand with meal planning.  I’m a pretty good meal planner but I’m making a better effort to have several veggies with each meal and I want to get back to eating/drinking more dairy. 

5.  Very limited drinking- I’m not really quantifying this because number 6 kind of does that for me.  I could just say no alcohol but I don’t like total bans.  So, we’ll go with limited.

6.  And the hardest… do not use more than 28 weekly points per week, and no more than 8 in a given day.  This really isn’t that major and once upon a time when I was losing regularly I tried to always keep my WP usage around 25-35.  Now it’s like, whaaaat you want me to not eat every point I have and then dozens beyond that?  The fact of the matter is, this is something I am capable of doing and did for most of my weight loss.  Just because I haven’t been gaining weight (well this week might be a different story..) doesn’t mean I should continue going over my points every week forever.  And it’s only 2 weeks.  If I can’t have that level of discipline for 2 measly weeks, I’ve really spiraled in recent years, regardless of what the scale says.

So that’s that.  It's my brain's logical and healthy answer when my heart says “juice cleanse, bitch!”  I just want to try to recapture the mindset of the earlier years on WW when I still like cared and stuff.  And looking over this list, we’re not talking massive life overhauls, just tweaking a few areas in which I’ve strayed.  I’ll try to update in 2 weeks to see if I’ve even stuck with this at all or if I forgot/gave up the following day.

LASTLY.. surgery is still scheduled for April 1 and it’ll probably stay that way but there’s a possibility I’m going to move it up to early March.  I might have to cancel my trip to Phoenix at the end of the month and I had been trying to wait a little bit to chew up all of my PTO.  But if I save those 3 work days I kind of just want to do the damn thing already.  So, that’s TBD right now but will update soon-ish.