Today marks the second day of my month-long detox. Fun stuff!

Over the past month or so, while I’ve been travelling around New York and finishing up at an old job and beginning a new job and indulging in holiday pleasures, I’ve been thinking about what I want to achieve over the next year. Ultimately I want to get back to being really healthy again, so my year-long goal is to become as healthy as I can be, in both body and mind.

This means that I’ll have several specific goals throughout the year:

1)      Lose 35 lbs in the first six months, and maintain that loss for the following six months. Six lbs each month is equivalent to losing 1 – 2 lbs each week; a healthy amount to lose. Under this category, I also wish to lose about 10% of my body fat, and several inches off my waist. It’s quite astonishing to realize I’ve gained that much in a year and a half. My BMI has just crossed over into the official “overweight” category, whereas I used to be on the low end of the “healthy weight” category. It’s not fun to no longer fit into your old clothes, or to find that you aren’t quite as strong or as fast as you used to be, or to realize that you’re a lot more susceptible to illness and disease. So therefore I’m using my Ultimate Nutrition Challenge to improve my weight and decrease my body fat so I can be much healthier. And that’s largely why we’re starting with a month-long detox 🙂

2)      Engage in mindful recreation several times each week. Ideally I’d like this to be a daily thing, but I know it will take a while to get there. By “mindful recreation,” I’m referring to acts in which I feel restful. Things like getting a massage, using my acupressure mat, doing yoga and meditating. It’s a great way to reduce anxiety and replenish energy stores.

3)      Regular exercise – cardio, strength training and flexibility – several times each week. I walk for at least an hour 6 days a week, but apart from that, intense cardio is sporadic. My flexibility training has been very weak in the past few months. I’m decently strong, and I usually lift weights a couple times each week, but I’d like to be more rigorous about it and be sure that I’m exercising those muscles for a decent length of time, three times each week.

The Ultimate Nutrition Challenge is an accompaniment to the above three overarching goals. The Challenge will allow me to try new ways of eating, to experiment with different foods, and to learn more about local foods and eat raw and such. I think the best part about this program is that I finally feel I’m mentally in a great place to ensure overall health – the last time I physically became very healthy, I wasn’t in a very good place emotionally, and I think that’s what led me down the path to gain all this weight and “let myself go,” to an extent. We need to be healthy in all areas of life if we want to feel and be our very best, and if we want to maintain that healthiness for the rest of our lives.

What are your year-long goals, and how do you plan to see them through? Do you have good health in all areas of life?