You say you want a resolution...ye-ah, you know...

I've never really been the kind of person to make New Year's resolutions. I don't know, I guess there just aren't a lot of things in my life that I really want to change. Not that I'm perfect, of course, just that the things I'd like to be different aren't really that easy to make a resolution about. Plus, it always seems like a silly construct: what's so special about Jan 1 that makes it the day to start making changes?

But last year, I sort of accidentally made a couple New Year's resolutions. I never really thought about it as "These are my resolutions," but near the beginning of last year I decided to try to make some changes. Namely, excerise more and eat more fruits and veggies.

I'm not exactly sure what prompted that, actually. A combination of factors, it seems. First semester of Med School was behind me, so I felt like I had a handle on the coming semester and could manage to make some changes. Plus, the curriculum is full of reminders about how important diet and exercise is to health, and I began to feel that, if I was going to counsel patients on losing weight, I'd better be able to do some of those things myself. And, annoyingly, my BMI was just in the "Overweight" range, which was frustrating. I never considered myself overweight, and still think that BMI is not an exact science and I might have been one of the people it didn't quite apply to. But I also didn't want to be one of the people who just makes excuses, so I wanted to try to get that BMI down into the normal range.

I don't actually remeber making a plan, but I ended up with what turned out to be a pretty good one. Rather than try to super-diet and drop the weight (which was really only about 5 lbs) really quick, I figured it would be better if I started slow. You know, so I'd have some chance of making it stick.

So I decided to try to go to the Nat and swim one day every week for the whole semester. And when it got tough to wake up at 6:30 am in the dark of winter and drag myself across campus, I told myself it was okay to do an easy workout, because it wasn't about the intensity, it was about just doing any exercise.

And it worked! Every week last semester, I went to swim (except for maybe once when I was sick--sleep was more important). I kind of fell apart over the summer, but last semester, I kicked it up to two days a week. (Though now I'm just working out in my apartment's weight room, not the Nat, because it takes less time out of my much fuller schedule--but it's not about the activity, it's just about doing something.) And, with one week under my belt this semester, I am aiming for three times a week. (And I think I can do it!)

Plus, I also got myself up to 5 fruits and vegetables every day. This took a little more planning, but I've managed to work in more plants to my diet--carrots for snaking, broccoli with my pasta, etc.

With all this, my BMI is now safely in the "Normal Weight" range, which I am proud of. I'm going to keep at it, though, because even if I don't need to lose more weight, exercise is good!

Lifestyle change like this is interesting to me. If I had thought about exercising 3 days a week at the beginning of med school, I would have thought it was impossible. But even with my much busier current schedule, I'm pretty sure I can do it. I think the key is baby steps, really. It sounds kind of cheesy, I guess, but it works.

I'm starting to see that this idea is catching on, too. I've heard some ads for the smallstep.gov website that's supposed to help give people ideas about little changes they can make (though I'm not sure how useful it actually is--a lot of their suggestions aren't really that small). Plus more and more of my classes and clinical preceptors are mentioning this idea when talking about counseling patients. I hope it keeps spreading, and not just with medical types. It seems like most people who need to make lifestyle changes don't even realize some of the easy things they could be doing differently. If we could get everyone to take just a couple of those small steps, I think health would improve in general.