Weeks 5 and 6, Happy New Year!

Happy New Year.  It feels like I can finally get down to the business I wanted to.  Somehow the holiday season just has too many impediments.  It's not that I didn't exercise, for instance, but without the usual routine, the hour or so of exercise didn't have the same impact, because I was too sedentary the rest of the day.  And eating carefully was blended too much with eating poorly.

The classic lesson: if it's in the house, I will eat it.  The solution: giving away the chocolates and grapefruit I got as holiday gifts.  Neither one is on the reflux diet, and both are very alluring to me.  I can manage not to eat the oranges that came with the grapefruits, but the grapefruits are too tempting.  All chocolate is too tempting.  So now it's all gone.

Also, the best of intentions can get sidetracked without me even really participating in the side-tracking.  I made a nice batch of whole grain, reflux-appropriate muffins, and half of them went moldy before I could eat them, making it hard to find a good breakfast for a couple of days.  It reminds me of the exercise limitations that my neck problem has caused; just when I was getting more committed to running, and even starting to like it, I found out that I couldn't do it anymore.  And while I like walking, it's not the same in terms of efficient calorie burning and heart-rate working.   (And the more I do the step-mill, the more my knee bothers me, making me not able to do the step-mill.)

So, resolutions for 2013?  Besides continuing with this project, and really trying to make it work, I am going to try to increase my hamstring flexibility.  That seems like a manageable goal, and one that's not so likely to get undermined by the various vicisitudes of the year; I can always add a stretch or two to my day without a lot of rearranging or disruption, and I can also just add more hamstring exercises to the Sunday morning yoga class. 

On the sad note, Whole Living, my favorite magazine, has stopped publication.  I always looked forward to the January issue, because it always had good healthy recipes and a "jump start" plan that was fun to contemplate, whether I did it or not (one year included a lot of juicing, which I don't think I believe in, given how important fiber is for one's diet).  It's sad to lose a very good, very interesting environmentally-conscious magazine, with lots of good information (not to mention beautiful pictures).  There are very few equivalents; Natural Health is good, but only publishes 4-6 times a year; Yoga Journal is great but the environmental stuff is secondary; Ode (which is now called something else) is not really about individual lifestyles as much as it is about larger political issues.  I would love to find something that has good values but isn't a polemic.