It's Goal Setting Monday!

Every Monday this year I would like to blog about goals that I'm setting from my life. On each Monday of the month I'm going to talk about different areas of my life that need improvement and the monthly goals that I'm going to set to help improve those areas.

This week I'm going to talk about setting goals for healthy living - including eating habits and exercise. The second Monday of the month is going to be devoted to my goals as a follower of Christ. At first I was going to not have this as a separate category because my Christian life is entwined in all of my life. I was just going to include those goals in my other weekly goals, but I changed my mind. I don't think that it would be a bad idea to devote a day of the month to set monthly goals regarding my walk with the Lord and then evaluating them. On the third Monday of every month I'll discuss my family goals. Finally, on the last Monday of every month, I'm going to talk about home improvement inside and outside of the house (and boy are there a lot of honey-do items that I need to catch up on). If there just happens to be a fifth Monday in any month we'll do a recap of what's happened so far. Of course, these will be monthly goals that I set and I will briefly update how I am doing in all areas every week, but each area of my life will get a specific Monday to reflect and consider what God wants me do regarding that area of my life.

The other day I found a post about goal setting on a website called Once A Month Moms. You can find it by clicking here. Okay, I know I'm not a mom, but it still had a lot of good ideas about how to set goals for yourself. It talked about breaking your goals down into small,  reasonable,  realistic, chunks. You know there are often times that I want to do everything at once. I look at all of these websites and read all of these books and I want to do it all now. But I've come to realize that doing everything at once wouldn't be good for me, my family, or our budget. Besides, I wouldn't know the first place to start. This is going to be a learning process as well as a life changing process. As I mentioned before in another post, we have already taken steps to to eat healthier and live healthier but it's come time to take it a step further since here are several areas that we are still lacking in.

Since I just got a new juicer, I was going to talk a lot about how I could change my drinking habits this week. No, not alcoholic drinking, but not drinking as many sugary soda's and things like that. Then, I signed up for Vintage Remedies' "8 Weeks of Real Foods". An eight week mini-course on turning your eating habits around and eating "real foods" instead of prepackaged, unhealthy, processed foods. Click here to get to their website to sign up.  Well, guess what the first week talked about? Drinking Habits! So, I guess God meant me to concentrate on that area first. Since we got a new breadmaker, however, I'm going to set some goals for that and throw in some exercise goals as well.

So, after that long introduction, what are my healthy eating goals for this month? Here they are:

1. Drink at least one healthy real juice or smoothie a day.


2. Limit my sodas to one or less a day.


3. Limit my coffee to one cup a day (Eek! I can't believe I just said that.).


4. Drink lots of water. Vintage Remedies says to turn your weight into ounces and then divide by two. I weigh about 200 lbs. That means I should be drinking about 100 ounces of water a day! What! I'll drown! That's 12 1/2 glasses of water if the glasses hold 8 ounces! Ah, well, they know best I'll at least try to do that. Try being the operative word.


5. Introduce my family to drinking healthy juices and smoothies. Hopefully by the end of the month they'll be sold on them and drink more as well - maybe one a day?!?


6. Bake at least one loaf of healthy bread in the bread maker every week. I'm looking forward to using the bread maker, so that one shouldn't be too hard. This will benefit the whole family as well.


7. Walk or do some sort of exercise for at least 15 minutes every day.

Everything I've read says that our goals should be doable, and I think that the above goals are doable. Remember, this is a monthly thing. We have a whole month to work on them. If I find that I meet some of them ahead of schedule, I'm going to make some new ones before the month is out but I'm not going to sweat it. It may take a month for me to work up to some of these things (especially the 12 1/2 glasses of water a day!) but that's OK. I have to remember that I'm taking small steps.

So, how about you? What are your goals for the month. Leave a comment if you would like. I'd love to hear from you. I was going to start a weekly meme, but I found out that there is already a great weekly meme called "Goal Planning Monday". It's on the blog "Mama Manuscripts". I'm going to start participating. Click here if you would like to participate as well.

Happy Healthy Eating!

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