another year you made a promise/another chance to turn it all around/and do not wait until tomorrow/embrace the past and you can live for now.
-ian axel, "this is the new year"
a few years ago, this song played during the credits of an MTV show called I Used to Be Fat. i remember watching four or five episodes of the show during christmas break my sophomore year of college. the show followed the lives of teenagers the summer after their senior year of high school, before they went off to college. the teenagers were overweight, and they were given the opportunity to work hard to lose weight and get healthy before starting this new journey; to be new people.
i watched that show, listening to this song, and felt inspired. i myself was overweight, and seeing those success stories was a turning point. i have spent the last 3 years with a different outlook and mindset about my weight, and have successfully lost about 60 pounds.
that new year (2011) was a game changer for me. i stood at the edge of the year, full of possibilities and promise, and i actually accomplished something. (sure, i didn't lose all 60 that year. probably about 25 or 30). i saw that i had the opportunity to do something that i wanted to do, and i did it. it was extremely empowering! and while i still sometimes feel like a fatty and whine about my weight and wish i was thinner, i am healthier and more active than i had been for the rest of my life previous to that year.
for 2012, i gave up drinking soda. i didn't have one sip of soda that entire year. it was a beautiful thing. after a while, ordering iced tea or water at a restaurant wasn't as devastating as it had been at the beginning (this came after kicking a wicked diet coke with lime habit). and it also helped me see that when i had literally said to someone, "i could never ever stop drinking soda," i was wrong. i could, and i did. before, i just hadn't wanted to.
for 2013, i gave up eating meat. i thought that it would be a good exercise in self-control, and i figured it would help me cut down on eating fast food (which, despite some marginally good efforts, had begun to become a habit-- what with late night college study parties, etc.). it was awesome. i hated it and complained loudly and obnoxiously for the first month, and after that, didn't look back at all. sure, bacon smelled good (and i will tell you, fake bacon is NOT worth it. simply not).... but it was overall an extremely satisfying way to stretch myself to the next level of resolutions.
this year, i debated for about a week into the new year. i thought maybe pescetarian, maybe vegan, maybe no refined sugar... couldn't decide. i ate one meal of fish, and decided i didn't want to do pescetarian. after a year of no meat, it was too weird to eat it all of a sudden. so i chose vegan. i started on the 6th, so i guess i'll be vegan until january 6, 2015. if all goes according to plan. so far it hasn't been too bad. just a lot of beans and rice and vegetables.
people are always saying, "why do you need to do this?".... and i guess my answer is that i love the challenge. not to prove to the world i'm awesome, but to prove to myself that i can have that self-control. i generally have very little self-control (shopping, dark chocolate, self-indulgent blog posts), so i like to stretch myself. and, as a perennial dieter/calorie counter/food obsessor, i find that my relationship with food is emotional--too much so. this year, i knew being vegan would cause me to forego many of my favorite go-to sad/happy/stressed/angry/bored foods in favor of a healthier or harder-to-access option, and i liked that idea. i don't want food to be any sort of emotional haven for me-- that was one of the biggest issues for me when i was slowly gaining weight throughout high school.
my family and friends think i'm crazy... because, let's be honest, vegan is kind of crazy. giving up meat was crazy enough for some people... and there are animal byproducts in everything...
but i bet that by the end of this year, i will have figured out a way to have vegan dark chocolate cake and ice cream and all sorts of awesome things. and even if i haven't, i will have exercised some serious self-control. and i like that.
i like to joke that my 2015 resolution will be to stop eating altogether.
