Balance, Habit and Accountability

I spend a fair bit of time thinking about goals, responsibility, and accountability. I need to spend a bit more time thinking about balance — and then spend time actually achieving some.

Last week, Shawn and our friend Renée made a goal of 10 weeks toward better health. They created an open FB group that has taken off: “10 weeks of feeling fine” with the goals of:

• regular walking (30 min a day at least 3 days a week)
• increased water intake
• getting more greens (officially a salad-a-day).

It’s not about weight loss and there will be no weigh-in, it’s about health and making simple conscious changes toward improvement.

At first I didn’t want to join in — don’t I have enough to worry about with work, writing, gardening, and other responsibilities? Thing is, I know I need more water. I could definitely do with more activity. Salad? Meh. But whatever. So I joined. Will joining a FB group help me with accountability? Who knows? It was helping somewhat with a little “super secret” group a few of us made for goal setting and getting stuff done… but that has fallen quiet.

It’s tricky to get that balance right and no matter how much outside accountability I try to find through friends, family, apps, or other nags, ultimately I know it has to come from me. Ultimately, I have to build habits that allow me to keep things even and maybe if I build enough good habits there will be no more room in the schedule for the lousy habits.

So, at the risk of public failure, I am going to declare four things I want to change about my health in the next 6 months:

1. Drink more water. I started by alternating water with coffee at work instead of just reaching for more coffee. Now I am keeping a tumbler of water beside me through the day while I am home. I am tracking right now, but hopefully by the end of 10 weeks I will just be used to drinking a given amount (around 2 L per day) and it will be a habit.

2. Walk and bike regularly. I would like to aim for one day a week of biking to and from work plus walks a few days a week. Problem with biking is that I am a sissy. I do not enjoy arriving at work drenched in sweat or soaked through with rain (coming home in crap weather is more manageable). Problem with walking is, well, I get bored of it. Also, crummy weather makes me not want to walk I just have to get over it.

3. Increase my flexibility. I have a bunch of yoga and exercise DVDs literally gathering dust (pictured, right). I need to work these back into my schedule (and try those I haven’t even cracked open yet), probably by adjusting my morning routine. I also need to figure out a true measure for flexibility — something I can’t do now but want to be able to do six months from now.

4. Change my snack habits. I need to either replace my crappy snacks with better ones or stop snacking. I was getting pretty good at not eating crappy salt/sugar/fat bombs but I’ve lapsed. I need to go back to having better snacks in the house but also breaking my habit of snacking-when-bored.

I believe these are all do-able — but the exercise ones will be trickier for me.