Now that March is done, I wanted to recap my goals I set for the month and how I did on my monthly challenge. I’ve been loving the goal setting work that I can do in my Spark Planner and it really has helped me to break down my goals into nice chunks so they don’t seem overwhelming!
First of all, my monthly challenge for March was to not get any delivery food at all. I don’t need to spend the money on it (and it’s not the cheap way to eat) and I know that I overeat and consume too many calories when I get delivery food. While there were a couple of times where I was feeling really lazy and just wanted to get something ordered in so I didn’t have to cook, I’m happy to share that I did not get any delivery food for the month.
I did go out to eat and sometimes got food to bring home, but that is a much more controllable amount of food and there are no minimums I have to meet in order to order. I’ve gone a month or so without delivery food in the past, but it’s never really been a conscious effort before. This time I had a reason to do it and a reason I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. I know that it’s not reasonable to say I will never get delivery food again (I do always get Chinese food delivered for Christmas), but I really do want to keep this new habit up and extremely limit how often I order in. I’m not sure what I want to limit it to, but I think once a month max seems like a good goal. I’ll have to see how it goes as time goes on, but I’m glad I set this goal for myself so I could prove that it’s not difficult and a lifestyle that I can maintain.
As for the rest of the goals I set for March, I did ok. I got all the workouts in for the month that I wanted to. I did try a new yoga app I have on my iPad (and I’m going to keep doing that). I worked on my budget and reevaluated things and figured out where I can save and where I can avoid spending. And I went on a ton of fun adventures with my friends.
The ones that I didn’t quite get done are having a home cooked meal every week. I did that for 4 of the 5 weeks this month. That’s not bad, but I know I could have done it that one week I didn’t and it frustrates me that I wasn’t able to motivate myself enough to do it. It does help that I’m keeping my house stocked with easy to put together things so I can eat those and not get delivery food. But microwaving something isn’t home cooking. And I had a goal to read one eating disorder book this month. I read about half of one book and the first few chapters of another. But there was always another book that distracted me and I didn’t finish the ones I set a goal to. This isn’t horrible, but I want to finish at least one of those books soon.
I’ve also spent the past few days thinking about the goals I want to set for April. I know that I have a certain number of workouts I want to get done, I want to do the home cooked meal once a week again, and I want to not order delivery food for the month. Those I think will be easy enough to do and I almost feel silly for writing them down because I see them as things that I will automatically do.
As far as the goals that are a bit more of a stretch for me, I’m still working on them and hope to have them figured out in the next day or so. I want to set a goal for a certain number of iPad yoga classes this month, but I don’t know how many I want to do. I also want to set a goal of something related to going out and having fun, but I’m not sure how I want to phrase it.
And the hardest thing for me to figure out is what my month-long challenge for April will be. I think it’s so difficult for me because each month I’ve had 100% success with my challenges. It doesn’t need to be that way (and the 30 days of completion don’t have to all be in a single month), but I’m really stuck in that mindset.
One of the ideas I thinking about has to do with weighing myself every day. I’ve rarely weighed myself every day. It can drive me crazy with the little fluctuations that everyone has. But I haven’t been doing so great with weighing myself once a week, so it could be a long time between weighing myself and I don’t want to avoid it. I realized that this month, I went over 3 weeks between weighing myself and I was starting to feel a bit panicky. I had no idea if my weight was up a bunch or down a bunch and I was terrified that I was going to be way up because I was avoiding reality. I was up by about 6 pounds, so it wasn’t that horrible but I know that I don’t want to repeat that gap between my weigh-ins.
I am a bit afraid that if I weigh myself every day I will get very obsessive with it, but maybe that fear is the exact reason why I need to set this as my challenge. I don’t have any other challenge ideas in mind right now, and if I don’t have anything else by this weekend I’ll probably set the weighing one as my challenge. But I’m not 100% ready to write it down just yet.
I hope that you guys are enjoying these monthly recaps as much as I’ve enjoyed sharing them. I think it’s so important to set goals and before this year I really only focused on annual ones. Now that I have weekly and monthly ones, I’m realizing how much I was skipping out on before and I almost feel like I am making up for lost time now.
