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As the new year approaches I’m sure everyone is thinking about their New Year’s resolutions. This is great actually, if you are, and if you’re not, no worries. You’ll get around to doing it eventually, right? I personally believe that it’s a great plan to start thinking about what goals you want to set and achieve in the new year. After all, in doing so setting these goals gives you something to look forward to!
All too often we may wait until the last minute to set a goal that we want to achieve. By this point we have put way too much pressure on ourselves to achieve this goal within a sometimes unrealistic amount of time. Don’t do that to yourself next year! The best way to avoid this is by planning and goal setting early! The earlier the better, and I promise you will save yourself from a big headache. Now that goal setting is out of the way let’s talk about the type of goals you should be setting for the new year.
Everybody usually makes some type of health and wellness related resolution for the new year. Some people actually commit to it and see it through, others attempt to follow through with it but ultimately let it fall through the cracks. What if I told you that you could make health and wellness goals, not resolutions, that are easy to commit to and follow through with? Would you be interested in what I have to say?Believe it or not you can, and I’ve got the right kind of health and wellness goals you should be making for the new year!
Health & Wellness Goals to Make For the New Year
1. Drink more water!
I literally talk about this all the time, but I love water. It’s so weird to say but I honestly do. Is it my favorite thing to drink? No, of course I’m not that out of tune with the world! However, I do think that it’s super important to drink as much water as you can in a day because it has so many health benefits! Water helps with clear skin, healthy hair and nails, it helps you maintain more energy throughout the day, helps you sleep at night, and most importantly it keeps you hydrated!
For a lot of people it can be hard to get in a good amount of water into their system each day. My trick to ensuring that I get at the very least 6 glasses a day, is to keep a water bottle with me at all times. I take my water bottle with me whenever I go grocery shopping, to pick my nephew up from school, whenever I leave one room in the house to go to another (yes this includes the bathroom), and while I’m working out. Having that water bottle basically attached to my hip reminds me to drink water. It’s a trick worth trying out simply because it just might help you drink more water too!
2. Engage in a physical activity that counts as cardio everyday
Naturally my mind wanders to walking. However, that is not the only physical activity you can do in a day. Believe it or not there are a ton of things you can do in a day and count it as some form of a physical activity that can and will count as cardio. Some of my favorites include cleaning your house (even if it’s just one room), cooking food, washing clothes, and of course playing with the littles.
Everyone is going to define and view cardio in a different way. That’s ok. For me, cardio is any form of a physical activity that is going to get your heart rate going. While a lot of the activities I listed above may not seem like the type of activities that will get your heart rate going, don’t underestimate their potential. The key to cardio is to keep moving for a specific time period. So depending on how long it takes me to complete one activity, I’ll usually kill time by multitasking and completing two activities at the same time until one of those activities have been completed. Thus completes my cardio goal for the day!
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3. Meditate more
Meditation is one of the easiest wellness practices you can incorporate into your daily routine. It requires almost no maximum effort and can be completed anywhere during any time of day. In order to mediate effectively all you have to do is take a couple of minutes in your day to just check in with yourself. Check in with how you’re feeling, any thoughts that are floating around in your head, what your breathing is like, and take the necessary time to tune into your 5 senses. Meditation is all about awareness.
I like to mediate often in my bed when I wake up in the morning before I start my day. This is simply because it’s honestly the only time of day when I’m not rushing or having to tend to everybody else’s needs. If I don’t meditate in the morning I usually do it at night right before bed. Pick a specific time during your day when you can get at the very least 5 minutes to yourself and just mediate. Sit with your eyes closed on the couch, lay in your bed, or really commit to it and sit crossed legged on the floor, with your hands resting gently on your knees, palms facing towards the sky to draw in energy, and mediate. No matter how or where you do it, you can do it.
4. Journal everyday
This can be a hard habit to pick up on. I understand that journaling in not for everyone. However,I still highly recommend that you at least try to make it a daily habit for yourself. Journaling is a great way for you to declutter your mind and hit the reset button for the next day. Plus, when we journal not only are we decluttering our mind, but we’re also taking the time to reflect on our day, put things into perspective, and check in with ourselves. I like to journal at night right before bed. As mentioned above this helps me declutter my mind and reflect on my day. It also helps me fall asleep at night.
I have a hard time sleeping if I haven’t processed things that happened in my day that I didn’t have time to process earlier. This helps me remain stress free and ready to tackle the next day! Journaling doesn’t have to be a 10 minute activity either. It should be as long as it needs to be for you to feel satisfied with processing your day. I usually journal for about 5 minutes every night, but there have been times when I’ve journaled for longer and shorter periods of time. It just depends on what happened in my day and how much decluttering of my mind I need to do!
5. Follow a fitness coach on social media
This past year I have come to discover that it’s easier for me to hold myself accountable and find the motivation to work out when I have a fitness coach that I am obsessed with encouraging me along the way. In the past I’ve always tried to tackle my health and wellness goals on my own. For a while I would do really well with keeping up with the routine, but eventually I would get bored, lose motivation, and just quit for the rest of the year. Whenever this happened I would always beat myself up about it, set a new year’s resolution to get back on track and NOT give up,but in the end I would never follow through.
This year I made a personal goal to follow my favorite health and fitness coach, Cassey aka Blogilates, on all her social media handles, and even subscribe to her blog, so that I would have a much easier time holding myself accountable. I’ll admit, in the beginning this was really hard for me simply because I’m not on social media all the time. However, I’ve trained myself to check in on all my social media handles at least twice throughout the day. I’ve also set reminders for whenever Cassey posts or uploads new content so that I can check it out and schedule it into my daily/weekly schedule to get it done. It was a rocky start, but I eventually got the hang of it and my wellness/fitness journey has been better than before!
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6. Set and commit to small exercise routines
I’m a firm believer in the idea that you can get effective results from working out in 15 minutes max a day. This is just my personal opinion and I stand by it. For starters working out has never been my strong suit. I enjoy working out because I love the way I feel afterwards. However, it does take a great deal of motivation to get me to work out, followed by a serious commitment to see any work out through until the end. I’ve come to discover that the best way for me to find that motivation and commit to finishing is by realistically setting aside enough time I can spare in a day to work out. That’s what I love about Cassey.
She makes working out fun, easy to commit to, and puts you in a position where there are no excuses for why you can’t get the job done. Most of her fitness videos on YouTube average out to anywhere between 20-30 minutes, but there are also a ton of exercises Cassey has put together that can be completed in roughly 15 minutes. What I like to do is get creative. If I really can’t spare no more than 15 minutes I put together some of my favorite workout moves from Cassey, and rotate through them for 15 minutes. If I can spare more time then I just follow along to a video on YouTube and get the job done. Either way, 15 minutes a day is enough time to see the kind of results you desire. It may take longer than cranking out 30 minutes of cardio a day, but working towards your goal is what really matters. Not how fast you can produce results.
7. Make more healthy meals
Healthy eating is always a big challenge for everyone and I’m no different. It can be hard to commit to eating healthy for a number of reasons, perhaps the biggest one being that it can become very expensive to do so. However, just like everything else in this world I’m sure there is a way to successfully accomplish this goal without breaking the bank (I’m hoping so anyways). Something I’ve learned about healthy eating is that you don’t have to jump into it head first, and commit all the way right off the back. Instead you can take it slow. Something that I really love about Cassey is that she puts a lot of thought into how she can best serve her audience as a health and fitness coach. I LOVE that about her because she basically does all the hard work for us, and just gives us the answers that we are looking for.
That’s what she did with her 28 Day Reset. This book includes a ton of healthy meals, with recipes and clear instructions on how to make them. All the food included in this book are super healthy and good for your body. The first best part is that there’s a selection of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert meals and recipes! The second best part, which just so happens to be my favorite part, is that she even organizes what meals specifically to eat for each time of day, during each day, of every week, for the entire month. Of course you can mix this up and pick and choose what you would and would not like to eat, but she gives you a guide plan so that it’s super easy to commit to!
8. Keep track of your habits
When pursuing health and wellness goals I think it’s important to keep track of all your habits, good and bad. I think it’s important to do so simply because it will give you a very clear idea of what is and is not working in your favor as you continue on this journey. There are a couple of ways in which you can do this, but perhaps the easiest way is to just write it all down in a journal. This can be a part of your daily journaling, or you can invest in a separate journal or notebook of any kind and keep all of this information stored in there. What I like to do is keep track of the all my bad habits because it helps me see where I’m not really making the commitment to change.
So in a journal that is separate from my daily journaling, I usually just write down things such as what I ate in a day, how long I worked out for and how it made me feeling DURING the workout, how many glasses (or in my case bottles) of water I drank, and how many times did I move throughout the day. These are my biggest habits that always manage to get in the way of my health and wellness goals, so I try to keep track of what I’m doing to help break myself of these habits. You can keep track of whatever habits you choose to, and do so however you choose to, but it’s a great technique that can help you see the bigger picture and areas that may need improvement, or areas where you should keep up the good work.
9. Set a weight goal
I’m not a big believer in working out or adopting any form of a wellness routine just so you can lose weight. I understand that for a lot of people losing weight is one of their main reasons for working out to begin with. Once they find a rhythm that works for them they either continue to work out or, they stop and only keep some of the healthy habits that helped them lose weight in order to maintain the weight loss. Hey, whatever side you are on I’m not judging! Again this is just my personal opinion and here’s why.
I feel like when you start working out and eating healthy, losing weight or maintaining a specific weight will come naturally. You’ll begin to learn your body and what kinds of foods and exercises have the effect on your body that you desire. So losing weight shouldn’t immediately be the number one goal, it should be learning how to better care for your body.
I’ve found that the best way to learn how to better care for my body is by simply learning what I’m most comfortable with, with my body. For me that means having a weight goal that I’d like to maintain over the course of a specific amount of time. That way when I approach working out or any form of a wellness routine, I’m not doing so with the intention of losing weight, but with the intention of transforming my body into what I am most comfortable with. This not only allows me to build a positive relationship with the idea of consistently working out, but it also helps me build a positive relationship with myself by understanding that I’m not doing this because something is wrong with me, but that I’m doing it because I want to feel good in my own skin.
10. Get others in involved
Perhaps the best way to tackle all your health and wellness goals moving into the next year, is to have a team of people who are supporting you. I can’t express to you how important it is to not travel down such a journey alone. Trust me, I’ve tried to do so for many years and it’s never worked out well for me. There’s no one in addition to yourself to hold you accountable for your actions, there’s no one to celebrate with you when you achieve a goal, and there’s no one to run the marathon and see it through to the very end with you! This may sound so cheesy, trust me I get it, but trust me when I say this is a less lonely road to travel down when you have people who are aiming for the same goals as you are, and have chosen to travel the road with you. So get others involved with your health and wellness goals so that you can crush all your health and wellness goals next year!
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That’s pretty much it! I know these health and wellness goals may not be ideal for some people, but they are the perfect goals for anyone looking to start their health and wellness journey slowly. Remember it’s a marathon not a race, so you are going to want to pace yourself. Slow and steady wins the race, choose to be the turtle, not the rabbit!What are your health and wellness goals for the new year?
-Xo
Kimora