2020 – De-frumping Goals

I had started this “postpartum” fitness plan post back in May or June of 2018 when I was thinking it was time to get fit after having my baby in March 2018… I never posted it… And I never finished it… Let’s just take a quick read at what I was going to say…

It’s official… I can no longer use the excuse of being pregnant for my extra weight… And now that I’ve waited the appropriate 6 weeks (okay, it’s more than that… but whatever…), I can get started on getting back in shape…

Of course, as with every new project, this starts with a spread in my bullet journal.  For my initial spread, I took to pinterest for ideas and found this one:

I believe I actually did make myself a version of that in my bullet journal at the time… I’ll have to dig back in to that book…

But that was over a year ago… almost 2 years ago now… And I never did “get back in shape”…

“But round is a shape…” Yes, yes, I can always find excuses for being overweight and sluggish, but I want to be healthy, and my current weight is not healthy for me. So, as I mentioned before, one of my themes for 2020 was to “de-frump.”

I left this theme purposely vague because I wanted to allow this goal to change over time, and also to give myself some leeway when making the goals to cover a lot of different aspects of my “frumpiness”… And with the current worldwide COVID-19 pandemic adding anxiety and throwing curve balls at everyone’s regular routines, giving myself some leeway is probably the best thing… Ultimately, though, the goal is to get fit and healthy…

So, after all this discussion… Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. At the beginning of April, I thought it would be a great time to start my new goal… I started writing this post then, but got sidetracked by life, and am now just coming back to this post to finish it… Anyway… I’m going to try and make these goals cumulative, so I’ll start with one or two habits or goals each week, then add on to them the next week. I’m going to start simple to get myself started with some easy successes.

April De-Frump Goals:

Week #1: (April 1 to 5) Go to bed by 10:30pm on weeknights & brush my hair every morning.
The better sleep I get, the more energy I’ll have and the better I’ll be able to tackle other aspects of my life. And I know brushing your hair every morning sounds like a given, but honestly, my hair is so straight that I don’t often *need* to brush it, and normally when I get out of the shower I just throw the wet hair in to a messy bun and forget about it. I think that putting a it of effort in to my hair will make me feel better about myself and my appearance, even if I’m not actually seeing anyone really…

Week #2: (April 6 to 12) Get up at 5:30am on weekdays & take my vitamins every morning.
If I want to have any time to myself before the little monster wakes up, then I’ll need to get up before him… He typically wakes up around 7am, sometimes we can push it to 7:30am, so a 5:30am wake up time will give me some time to be productive, either on stuff around the house, my personal goals, my blog, or to get some work done. Also, I have totally fallen off the wagon of taking my vitamins… After years of being good (especially while pregnant and breast feeding), I’m not even sure why I got out of the habit… But it’s time to get back in to it.

Week #3: (April 13 to 19) Go for 2-3 runs & drink 8 cups of water a day.
I’m going to try getting back in to running in the mornings. Since I am not “single parenting” my mornings anymore, I can totally get up early (hence the 5:30am wake up goal) and get out of the house before anyone else gets up. I think that getting some early morning exercise will help my mental health along with my physical health, and will probably help me be better focused when I sit down to work. And I’m *pretty sure* that I am drinking the required 8 cups of water (mostly in tea form) a day, but I haven’t been tracking it for a while, so I want to get back in to that too…

Week #4: (April 20 to 26) Wash my face and apply moisturizer every morning.
This is another one that might sound like an obvious one to most people, and I do wash my face most mornings, but I rarely put moisturize on my face… And I’m not getting any younger, my skin could use all the help it can get to keep from getting too wrinkly as I get older, and my moisturizer has sunscreen built in, so as we approach summer, it will help keep my paleness from getting lobster red sunburns.

Week #5: (April 27 to 30) Don’t eat anything after 9pm.
I’ve heard that not eating after a certain point in the evening can be very good for your health. I believe this is probably true for multiple reasons, but for me, the big one would be that I never eat anything healthy late in the evenings. I have heard 8pm to be the magic time, but honestly, the little monster’s bedtime often bleeds close to 8pm these days, and I typically need/want to have a bit of a snack after he’s gone to bed so I can actually pay attention and enjoy whatever it is I am eating… So I’ve picked 9pm for my time. If I’m still doing the 10:30pm bedtime, it still gives me an hour and a half between my last food and bedtime. That should be good enough to mostly digest the food…

Of course, setting goals means a new spread in my bullet journal:

Of course, now that it is midway through April, probably best to show you an updated version of the page:

These goals have been created with the assumption that we will be remaining in this current social distancing lock-down until at least the end of April, which I’m pretty sure is pretty safe to say based on all the news I’ve seen.

What do you think of my goals? Too simple? Too complicated?

Daffodil Photo by Anthony Young on Unsplash

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2017 in Review: Misc. Goals

As usual, I totally underestimated how busy I’d be over the holidays, so I haven’t finished up all my goals review posts ahead of time, like I thought I would, but here we are on New Year’s Eve, so I figured I’d quickly review my goals for 2017 and see how I did… Then next week I can go over what I want to accomplish in 2018.

For 2017 I gave myself 5 miscellaneous/personal goals.  I did a review back in September, and honestly, I don’t know that I have too much to add my review right now, but I’ll go over each one anyway…

September Focus Results

After the first week of meal planning, which I wasn’t really sure if it was a success… I took some of the advice I received and continued, though I didn’t concern myself as much with things staying on the exact day they were assigned…

Here’s how things went…

Week 2:

My meal plan in my bullet journal didn’t really get any prettier, but I think it was a bit better laid out…

Monday, I made my dinner plan be “my husband”… He had the day off work, and I had a meeting right after work, so we got him to do the meal plan and cooking.  Rather than force him in to cooking a specific thing, I left it open for his creativity/desires.  We ended up with BBQ chicken skewers, which were delicious!

Personal Goals Update

At the beginning of the year I made myself 5 personal goals.  I haven’t done any posts summarizing how those goals are going so far this year, so I think it is high time for me to do just that… So, here it goes…

Goal #1 was to visit with friends and family at least twice per month.  I started with this spread in my bullet journal:

Then I moved to my new bullet journal and I never copied that spread over… Well, until now… But I decided to go through my bullet journal and fill in where I did stuff with people that was recorded in my bullet journal (there were probably other things that weren’t recorded, but this is the best that I can do for now…)

September Focus: Meal Planning

One of my personal goals for 2017 was to have a focus for each month.  I did okay with my morning routine in January, and then I went the other direction in February by concentrating on realistic expectations… But then I didn’t define another monthly focus until June, and then it wasn’t even that successful… July and August went by without any focus… And so we have made it to September… I’m going to renew my attempts at having a focus for the month.

I originally tried having this as my focus for February, but that fell through… So, I have decided to revisit meal planning for my September focus.

I showed various versions of my past “meal planning” when I discussed my weekly spread in my bullet journal, but honestly, I wasn’t very good at it. And, at some point over the past year I stopped writing out a full week of daily layouts on my bullet journal ahead of time, and with that I stopped putting in a meal plan for the week… I still tracked what I was eating, but I didn’t have a place to write down the plan… And then, at some point in July, I stopped even keeping track of what I ate in my bullet journal (I still keep track, but I moved to keeping track of it in an app – MyFitnessPal).

Anyway, this is a long winded way of saying that I haven’t had a weekly meal plan written down in a very long time…

My Training Plan for July, August and September…

I am planning to run in a half marathon in October… The one that I didn’t run in last year because I was sick… And didn’t train…

So this year I am going to train… so at least I’ll be prepared and will hopefully be able to work through a bug or sickness if one comes at the wrong time again… (I say this every year, and never really follow through, but I keep trying, so that’s something, right?  Maybe this year will be the one I actually complete a training plan… )  This is part of the reason for my focus on fitness in June, that didn’t end up very successful…

I’m two weeks in to the training plan, and I’ve already fallen behind, but that’s okay.  I’m going to persevere and try to do better.  As with everything I do these days, I made a spread in my bullet journal to lay out the training plan.  Here it is:

June Focus on Fitness Results

I bet you are wondering how my “focus on fitness” went in June, right?  Okay, maybe you aren’t, but I’m going to share with you anyway… 

June Focus: Fitness

In an effort to get back on track with the blog, and my life in general, I have decided to bring back the monthly focus that I had as a personal goal for 2017.

I have sort of successfully completed a focus for January (My Morning Routine) and for February (Realistic Expectations), but then I sort of fell off the monthly focus wagon… I don’t remember doing a focus for March, April or May… But that doesn’t mean I am going to give up completely on my goal.  I am going to jump in with a focus on fitness for June.

February Fitness Update

Just because I’ve given up my mini-fitness challenge for February and instead given myself a focus of decreasing stress and a challenge to relax and read for the month of February, doesn’t mean that I’m not wanting to keep up on my fitness.  Do you remember the running goal I made myself for 2017?

In case you missed my original personal goals post for 2017, I have signed up for a challenge to run 1000 km in 2017.  When I first posted about it, I had only been on 1 run, and so my total was 3.5 km.

After that, I can’t say I made huge progress, but since my normal running partner is super pregnant, and my back-up running buddy has had a couple issues with hamstring injuries, I’ve had to rely on my own personal motivation (not the best…) to get myself up in the mornings in time for a run.  Add to that we’ve had some very atypical weather for our area which brought snow and ice to our normally mild climate, I have had some difficulty getting out running…

But… That doesn’t mean I have made some progress… Let’s see my January calendar:

Personal Goals for 2017

Last year I had financial goals and miscellaneous goals… This year I’ve decided to rename the miscellaneous goals to personal goals… But the content of them hasn’t really changed much.

2017 Personal Goals

I’m always wanting to improve myself in all aspects, as I hope is evident from the name of my blog, but we aren’t really capable of concentrating on too many things at once, so it is better to focus on one or two things at a time and really get a hold on them before moving on to the next thing… I tried to keep that in mind when I was making my personal goals for this coming year.