Resolutions - The Balanced Kitchen

Did you know that only 9.2% of people felt that they were successful in achieving their New Year’s resolution?! That means that 90.8% of people felt that they had not succeeded. Brutal. Over the past year I have been doing a lot of reading about habits and one of the things that comes up over and over again is that habits are really hard to break because our brains become hard-wired to fall back on those habits, especially when we are tired or stressed or distracted. What this means is that when you are trying to change a habit there are two steps you can take to improve your chances of success: one is to replace the old habit with a new and easy-to-accomplish one and the other is to start with a small change that will then create a ripple effect.

Now that all sounds fine and good, but what does it actually look like? As you know, I am all about simplicity and practicality. So I wanted to share some possible ways that you might be able to tackle those health-related resolutions and achieve your goals….

Over the winter holidays I was lucky enough to get to spend a week with my whole family in Colorado. This year, as all of us gathered together, a good number of us were preoccupied because of various transitions we are going through. Despite that preoccupation, though, we all launched into our favorite activities with one another—cooking, eating, hiking, and playing games. We were really trying to have fun and enjoy our time with one another but there were definitely moments of disconnect because of our distracted states.

All of that changed, though, in about five minutes one evening after dinner. A group of us had sat down to play one of our favorite games, a tile-based game called Qwirkle. As a family full of competitive people there were often exclamations of, “how could you do that?!” or “you just ruined my move!” All of which is meant in good fun, but can definitely have some edge to it. My brother, one of the most competitive of the bunch, was watching the round rather than playing and took it upon himself to take on the persona of a very mellow, non-competitive person to remind us that the game didn’t really mean anything, that it was “just tiles on a board” and then he went on to reference #jtob as the way we should all look at life….

3 Simple Ways to Make Your Health-Related Resolutions Actually Stick

Just Tiles on a Board: My New Year’s Commitment to Myself