On the Right Foot

As scary and inconceivable what I'm about to proclaim is, you must believe it because the fact of the matter is that it is indeed possible to be more of a 'black-and-white' person than I am today (which is a feat in and of itself)... just ask the Kara of years-past.

And well... with that proclamation under my belt, and here we are in the midst of the season of resolutions, you'd naturally think I was either going full-steam ahead with a very solid and thought-out itemized and bulletized list or heading in the direction of what seems to be a bit of a trend these days and blowing off the idea of resolutions altogether.

If you're even remotely still with me (yawn - hey, at least scroll to the bottom of my rambling for the recipe so you don't miss the good stuff), I'm about to blow your mind (this is big stuff, folks, really... important, mind-boggling stuff) because I'm here for one purpose today and that's to tell you about my Anti-all-or-nothing, just-the-basics plan, for 2010 for this here, Kara.

It goes something like this... one of my fun blog friends came up with the wonderful idea to gather interested people in her online community and rally together to just get healthy in 2010. There were no prescriptive instructions (which of course freaked this by the rules... there are rules, right? girl out!) except that we'd all commit to trying it for the first 10 weeks (and I suspect a lot of it will be habit by the end of that time period) - so off we went about setting our own goals and figuring out how to hold ourselves and each other accountable.

And wouldn't you know? I think I kinda like this. I started with an initial (albeit draft) list of goals and tweaked them even in these first two weeks already - and it didn't bother me one bit! But in the name of being held accountable (or at least being shamed into trying really hard) - I wanted to let you in on what I'm attempting to follow and changes I'm trying to make, both little and big (okay, mostly little). Your job here is to let me know other ways you go about your daily life making healthy decisions and share them here with the rest of us!

• get to sleep at 10pm (or earlier) one night a week (status: ah-hem, as they say... first is the worst)
• cut out alcohol consumption completely Sunday through Thursday evenings (status: so far so good!)
• only conscious eating, i.e. no snacking while reading the mail, etc. (status: pretty good)
• drink more water (status: this isn't really that fair because I already drink a fair amount but I'd like to drink more)
• go dessert-less 1-2 nights a week (status: good, but I need to be careful not to eat the dessert I know I won't have that night during the middle of the day)
• expand my repertoire of healthy recipes by cooking at least 3 new healthful recipes a month (status: great, thanks to Cooking Light!)
  

And less specifically food-related but still healthy (in my mind at least):

• write two cards to friends and family a month, for any (or no!) reason at all (status: Christmas cards and subsequent thank you notes have consumed my life for the past month but I'm ready to get started!)
  
• stress myself out (especially over little things) less (status: as you might think, if you know me at all, figuring out how to stress myself out less is kind of stressing me out more... so still much work on this to be done)
  

A week and a half in and this challenge has proved to be just that, a challenge. Some of my goals, as miniscule as they seem, are quite lofty for me - but I've decided that they are all worth pursuing, even if I fall short in the end.

One of the easiest and most fun parts of this has been finding new healthy recipes for us to try out. This Turkish Carrots and Lentils caught my eye since I am full on obsessed with cooking with dried beans these days. Between this and the Black Bean Salsa Chili (that we made with slow-cooked dried black beans), we've been happy eating healthy and hearty meals (with left-overs to boot... the best of both worlds - good-for-you and easy on the wallet!).