21 days.

I wish this was my book case...

Hello lovelies!

I don’t want my blog to turn into a daily bitch fest, but I just need to get something off my chest. As a Virgo, I am a naturally organized person. My bedroom is generally clean, I know where everything is, I hand things in on time, and I am always early for anything I need to go to. It’s just part of who I am.

Now, I live with my parents and my brother. My brother is profoundly disabled, and as a result my mother sacrificed her career to be his full time carer, and has remained in that role for 26 years. She also never got her license, and as such, I am her chauffeur and grocery/errands/coffee companion. To compound this situation, my father had an operation last week that will prevent him from working for many weeks and has left him unable to drive in the short term.

I am happy being the driver. Don’t get me wrong. Especially since I stopped working and have very little to do with my time, I relish the opportunity to get out of the house and do things instead of sitting around feeling four walls creep in around me. But. Oh yes there is a but. My organized self would like some warning. Take this morning for instance. I woke up at the ripe old time of 9.30am, and hopped out of bed with the resolution of reading all the material pertaining to my essay, and getting stuck into writing it. Until I got pounced upon by both my mother and father, demanding different things that would require my services: dropping forms at the council offices, taking a gargantuan pile of crap to the op shop, and buying potatos. Because you know, we can’t live without potatos. I was very grumpy. All my well laid plans were wasted.

Is it really too much to ask that they organize their time a little? Decide on a sunday what errands need to be done, what groceries need to be got, and mutually deciding on a day to do it all? Or am I just anal? I hope not!

…

Okay, rant over. Phew! I really needed to get that one off my chest, I was in a bad mood all day as a result of it and the only thing that restored some good cheer was a good sweaty gym session. Thank heavens for endorphins!

So to lighten the mood, here are three things that made me happy today:

1. The ridiculously delightful amount of super bright saturating sunshine that smiled down on us all day despite it being late winter. Divine!
2. Driving alone in my car with the windows down in aforementioned sun, singing along to terribly bad pop songs on the radio at the top of my lungs.
3. The chivalry of a pretty young gentleman at the gym. If you hold the door for me, you win brownie points. 🙂

Weeee!

…

And now to my actual post for today. I bet you were all just dying in anticipation, weren’t you? 😉

“You will never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine.” -John C. Maxwell.

According to experts (of whom I tried to find the name of but could not), it takes 21 days to make or break a habit. Conversely, if you drink a glass of water every morning for 21 days, you will automatically drink the glass of water on the 22nd day. Similarly, if you fall into a pattern of eating chocolate every evening after dinner, you will continue eating that chocolate every day after the 21st day of consumption.

As part of a wonderful online personal training package shared with me by my equally wonderful physiotherapist friend Ann, habit formation is encouraged and supported. Until now I haven’t really looked at it, but after several weeks of falling back into eating patterns I had spent so long trying to break, getting apathetic about going to the gym and when I am there being lazy about it, as well as sleeping late and just leading a lethargic terrible life, I decided it was time to make a change. It was time to get tough. It was time to kick my own arse into gear!

I have reached a fork in the road...

So over the next few months I have decided to try some ‘habit formation’.

It is not recommended that you try and form too many habits at once. For instance, if you created a list of twenty habits and tried to implement all of them at once over a three week period, you would more than likely abandon most if not all because it would be just too hard to do all at once. So I have decided to attempt to implement three habits a week, for three weeks, so that at the end of a five week period I will have hopefully implemented nine habits. The majority, if not all (I haven’t formulated all as yet) of the habits will be health, fitness, food and lifestyle related. I have been on a health kick with small results so far, but I really want to rev up my efforts so that I see some serious results, and hopefully be able to buy my first bikini EVER this summer!

So for this first week, my habit goals are as follows:

1. Get up at or before 8 am every morning.
2. Eat breakfast every day.
3. Drink at least a liter of water a day.

As you can see, they are not very challenging habits, at least not to the naked eye. For me however, the first one is going to be a major habit to form. Seeing as I do not work, and have one class a fortnight, the majority of the time I have very little to do with my time. As a result, I have been getting up anywhere between 9 and 11 everyday. A trickle on effect of this is that my consumption of breakfast is pretty sporadic, as I often just decide to wait for lunch, and as a result, snack aimlessly throughout the day. So really, habits one and two go hand in hand. Better sleeping patterns will allow me to awake early enough to eat breakfast, and generally get more out of my day. Habit three, water consumption, is more of a rectification goal. I lost my 1 liter water bottle, and ever since have not consumed anywhere near the amount of water I used to. My skin is bitching to me about it constantly. So after I post this, I am heading over to amazon to buy myself a pretty water bottle to inspire me to up my water consumption, and also to reduce my environmental impact by refilling a sturdy bottle rather than buying 1 liter mt franklin bottles that die on me after a few weeks.

So there you have it. My three goals. Which will hopefully, in three weeks time, be three habits that will stick with me for life. Next Tuesday I will have my next three habits ready to report to you all, my oh so massive reader base. 😛

Do you have any habits who wish you could form, or wish you could get rid of?

xx