Forget the New Year’s Resolutions Fitness Families.com

Forget the New Year’s Resolutions

I realize this may not be a very popular thing for me to say but I am starting off my first fitness blog for the year 2011 with this, forget the New Year’s Resolutions. Why? They typically don’t work. It’s like Moses and the children of Israel who wandered around in the desert for 40 years. Do we really want to keep going around and around the same old mountain?

I don’t mean to make light of the changes that many of my friends are attempting to make but it is almost humorous to me the Facebook statuses that I have been seeing. Suddenly my friends are drinking healthy shakes, eating exotic (but apparently good for you foods), joining a gym and well, the list goes on.

The reason I find this a bit funny is because it’s like déjà vu. Didn’t the same type of Facebook statuses appear at the same time last year? January was all about, “This is it. I am finally going to lose that weight.” “I am finally going to get healthy.” But come February it began to wane and definitely by March most have gone back to the same old patterns.

So this is why I say to forget the New Year’s Resolutions. There is nothing magical that is going to happen because it’s a New Year. There is nothing mystical about January 1, 2011 or any of the following days in January. It is yet another month in another year.

Sorry to sound like such a downer but I don’t plan on leaving you there. I do have good news. Change can happen. It’s just that we can’t rely on resolutions to make it happen. Change can only happen when it comes from deep within. We have to want to make the changes. We have to desire them. And they won’t come to us simply because it’s a new year, a new month or a new week.

I don’t say this to hit you over the head because I am speaking to myself. I have done the same thing. I have gotten excited over the prospect of a New Year and said to myself, “This is it, this is the year it will happen.” But it doesn’t. That’s because my focus was on the fact that it was a New Year, not that I seriously desired to change.

So I am looking at 2011 as the start of a fitness journey that I invite you to join along. It’s about being real and being realistic.

So let my first piece of “realness” be the fact that despite my need to lose some weight and get healthier, I haven’t achieved it yet. It’s a work in progress. Guess what? I didn’t make any New Year’s Resolutions and I don’t plan to.