Working past the winter 'blahs'

Now that Winter has finally hit northern California (hooray!) I thought this would be a good time to talk about making a change in your fitness for the new year and how to keep it going past the first 2 months!

So - first things first- Come up with realistic answers to these questions:

1) What am I hoping to achieve?

2) what are my goals for this week? this month? this year?

3) What am I willing to change?

4) HOW am I willing to change?

5) what is going to keep me motivated?

6) WHY and WHAT am I trying to change?

Answering these questions (and maybe you have more, that I didn't mention?) allows you to get an idea of what your serious goals are (what recurs?) and start your journey!

1) What you're hoping to achieve - I could get on my high horse here and tell you it should be something like "a strong and healthy heart" or "a better sense of health" or "be fit enough to have energy for the day", but we all know No.1 on most of our goals is to look better and feel better about how we look. Eventually, this may segue to the others, but for now... for a start - it'll do.

2) what are your goals for this week, month, year - this will give you practice making goals (hopefully realistic) that will help guide your progress. It also will help you connect to the rest of the questions in a realistic, achievable way.

3) What are you willing to change - This is important! What you are willing to change will determine (in a big way) what your progress will be and how you will progress. Are you willing to change your eating habits? Sleeping habits? Time use habits (c'mon people, I'm as addicted to facebook as you are!) Only you know the REALISTIC answer to this question. For example, I keep telling myself I'm going to stop eating sugar and that I won't eat artificial sweeteners (which I don't anyway - gross!), but I know that realistically, I'm not going to be able to cut sugar out of my diet completely. I'm not fully willing to change that part of my diet!

4) HOW are you willing to change - are you willing to change how you think about yourself? how you think/feel about exercise? about food? How can you make changes that will help your journey - only you can answer this!

5) what is going to keep you motivated - do you need someone else to keep you accountable? can you do it yourself? Maybe you need a picture to remind you of goals (or where you were that you don't want to go back to). Motivation - a serious, long term motivation - is what will keep you going when you most want to stop.

6) WHY and WHAT are you trying to change - Hah! this sounds familiar (see question 1). "I want to have slimmer thighs because I want to feel sexy in my jeans." sound familiar? :-D But seriously, think about why you want to change what you want to change. It will bring everything around.

Next up - workout options to keep you going in the new year!

- Katie