I used to be huge on New Year’s resolutions, and over time I realized that I never even remembered what they were past July or so and they typically went unaccomplished. My new philosophy is not to make hard and fast resolutions, but to use the new year as a way to measure progress and keep things in perspective. A year ago at this exact time I was realizing how much our diet of rich and processed foods was abusing my body and the body of my new husband, and I resolved to do better in learning how to eat clean and live clean. Before that time we would frequently go days without seeing a fruit or vegetable, and I bought a new pound of butter every week for cooking. What a difference a year makes! And living this new lifestyle we both feel SO much better.

This year we joined a CSA, tried kale for the first time, said goodbye to potato chips and soda and hello to fresh food and time outdoors.

I don’t have a list of things I want to accomplish in 2012 or a number that I want to see on the scale before this time next year. I just want to continue being happy and finding ways to live life to the fullest in the way that God intends me to. I’ll keep making goals to try and better myself, and I’m sure I’ll continue to succeed with some and fail with more. Speaking of failure goals, let’s see how I did with the goals I made back in December!

Practice Yoga Daily

Hahahahahahahaha. Hilarious. Yeah. This didn’t happen at all, and I admit that I didn’t really expect myself to succeed with this one. I did, however, practice yoga a few times, which is certainly better than nothing! 😛

Bake Lots of Holiday Treats

I wish I had more time to do this but by the time finals were over it was pretty much time to pack up and leave for Christmas in New Jersey. I did manage to squeeze in some yummy molasses cookies

and white chocolate cranberry cookies when my friends EmPri and KJ came to visit!

I also baked up quite a few rum cakes to give away to Jason’s family as Christmas gifts!

I wanted to bake up some gingerbread men and maybe a bûche de noël, but I guess that will have to wait until next year…or the year after.

Keep my immune system strong

Unfortunately that pesky infection did come back at the beginning of December, but I caught it early and fought it off with antibiotics and lots of vitamins. Since then I’ve been swearing by my Green Vibrance supplement, which I make into a green smoothie every morning. I’ll be doing a post on it later, but I honestly feel like it has done my entire body so much good and kept my immune system really strong. I’m feeling great and I’m hoping the health problems are gone for good!

Don’t let final exams cause a nervous breakdown.

Check. Barely. 😉

My goals for January are pretty small, mostly because I would like to actually be able to accomplish them. My first big goal is…

Go to the gym. I’m not talking about working out a certain amount of times or anything. I literally mean that my goal is to just step inside of the gym one time. We just got the access code to the gym in our subdivision, which is literally a two minute walk from our front door. If we can’t manage to get inside the door of the gym, that would be pretty sad.

(Source)

Eat more salad! Jason and I are STRUGGLING after the indulgences of the holidays. I’ve had constant heartburn for about a week now, and Jason got really sick last night from just overdoing it with the rich foods. Our bodies have had it, and so have we. I just got a salad spinner (best invention ever!) which makes having salad at home a lot cheaper because I can easily use whole bunches of greens. I want to do all sorts of creative salads this month to make meals that won’t set my chest on fire or make us throw up! 😛 Shouldn’t be too much to ask–I love a good salad!

Bake more bread. That is why I wanted that stand mixer after all! I’ll have a blast working on this goal, and Jason won’t mind too much either.

I think that’s plenty to work on for this month! We have one more week of winter break before heading back to classes so I’m excited to get back in the kitchen and start blogging about recipes again. That’s my idea of fun. 🙂

Thanks for reading!

-Lauren