New Goals For The New Year

I know entering into the new year it’s a stereotype to set health & fitness resolutions goals but I’m doing it anyhow. In the past 12 years of working to improve myself and having lost over ~160 pounds I’ve set a lot of goals but this year I’m going somewhere I’ve never gone before. Here’s my first goal of the year:

Goal 1: Lose 80 Pounds

I know, that’s a lot of weight but I’ve also never set an annual goal of weight loss, never in 12 years. I’ve always just said I was going to eat healthier and work out more consistently. Never have I set a weight loss goal, until now.

I’m weighing into the new year at 294.2 which is pretty much where I was at the start of last year. By the end of October I was down to about 266. I’m hoping that a bit of my gain is water weight but I’ve got my work cut out to lose my goal of roughly 20 pounds per quarter in 2013.

No big goal like this would be successful without an equally big plan and here it is.

• Better Family Meal Planning — The first pivotal part of losing weight is eating right. As a family of 5 that’s very challenging with the smallest thing throwing off not 1 or 2 people but all 5. Heading into 2013 Amy and I are going kinda old-school with our planning. We bought a nice new calendar whiteboard and are using it to plan out meals each week. We usually plan on some loose paper, go shopping, and toss the list. We then randomly follow or don’t follow that schedule as the week progresses. The further we get into the week the less we usually hit that plan. That’s ending heading into 2013, we’ll be planning out meals and our workouts …
• Workout Variety & Planning — With Amy also getting back on track it’s even more important (and challenging) that we both get our workouts in. Much like the family meal planning above we’re setting up a schedule for workouts well in advance and sticking to them. Getting into a fitness routine and making it priority for this “me time” is going to be instrumental to both of our success.
• No Free Meal / Day Craziness — Heading out of the holidays and into a new year I’m sweet overloaded. I don’t want nor do I care to see a cookie or a sweet any time in the near future. I also don’t want any other bad foods. In 12 years of eating healthy’ish I can honestly say I’ve never not had a free meal or free day after ~1 week. Think about that, every week I was on track I ended it with some kind of free food something. I can honestly say I have no idea how my body is going to react not having to recover for a few days after eating bad (look at my October progress graph to see what I mean). I could lose a crazy amount of weight or I could hit an instant plateau.

Goal 2: Cycle The Triple Crown

I love cycling (as if you didn’t know that already) and last year I set a pretty crazy riding goal of 6,000 miles which I did not reach (I was over 1,500 but under 3,000). I know now that’s not realistic at this point in my life but that doesn’t mean I can’t set a big goal this year for cycling. To keep my goals interesting, yet still practical for my family, I’m thinking that the Wisconsin Triple Crown sounds awesome.

No, it’s not a horse race though I am a clydesdale cyclist so it is kinda a horse ride of sorts. Anyhow, it’s actually 3 different rides in May, June, and August. To qualify for the Triple Crown you must choose distances of equal or increasing length for each subsequent ride. I’m not certain on the distances I want to do yet but I’d like to shoot for either 50 km, 100 km, 100km, or 3 x 100 km rides.

My success in these rides is going to be primarily driven by my weight. I’ve shown it time and time again but the less I weigh the easier the rides are. Obviously the more I work out and the better I eat the more I can lose and as such the healthier and fitter I am. Thus it makes sense that when I lower my weight these rides won’t be as difficult. So the greater my success getting healthier the easier the rides will become.

Other Goals

I debated on adding other goals but to be honest, I can’t think of anything else. I’m happy in so many ways with parts of my life. Sure there are things I need to work on but are they worthy of a new year resolution goal or are they just things I need to improve on? To me New Years goals are usually things people want to be accountable for with concrete measurable timeframes, not necessarily things they need to improve on. If that were the case my list would be a mile long and they might not even be something I could measure success or failure with.

Anyhow, those are my 2 huge goals for 2013. How about you, have you set any goals for 2013?

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• Looking Back @ 2012
• Ready, Set, Reset, Ready, Set, Reset…