It’s almost March which means a full two months have passed since most of us made our annual commitment to be better people, save the world, stop smoking, find more time for friends and family or get out of debt – some of the more popular New Year’s resolutions made each and every year. For those of you that follow my blog, you know how opposed I am to the term resolution, because it is such a weak term and lacks basic accountability as evidenced by how much meaning is put behind a resolution in Congress. But hey, it’s a whole lot more catchy and less corporate than New Year’s Objective, a term which actually creates visions of drinking oneself into oblivion while hooking up with strangers at a New Years party. So New Year’s Resolution it is.

My own objective/resolution was to lose ten pounds in ten weeks, and I’ve been pretty darn dedicated to doing this including posting weekly results on my blog and being a part of the 10in10in10 Challenge. Even with my background in health and fitness, I have found this seemingly simple task quite the challenge. I’m down four pounds so far but it has been quite the yoyo experience, lose two pounds one week, gain one-and-a-half the next, and so on.

Having recently moved to NE Ohio, I have found both the good – lack of typical restaurants, and the associated calories, that I would typically frequent in NY, and the bad – Duck’s kitchen. OK, in all fairness, I have to openly admit I absolutely love Duck’s kitchen because it is incredibly warm and friendly with family members and friends stopping in at all hours of the day and night to sit down and partake of any number of delights that she has somehow constantly bakes throughout the day. I’ve often wondered to myself if this is how Mrs. Fields got started. The bad part is that the house should essentially be built out of gingerbread. There is sugar everywhere, cookies and pies on the kitchen table and counter tops, bins of cookies stacked five feet high in the family room, pancakes and waffles being made as soon as you wake up and more deserts being prepared right before you go to sleep. It’s utterly a diabetic shock waiting to happen. This is what I have to navigate through to get from the living room to the kitchen table, and again, this is not for any holiday, this is just what it looks like during the middle of any typical week and I’m not even showing the bins of cookies.

So as I’ve been going through this 10in10in10 Challenge, I have been hard pressed not to partake in any of these sugary treats and have been outstandingly successful. I think this is a positive indicator of how committed I am, this and the fact that there is a Cold Stone less than 10 minutes from my house and I haven’t been there once; alright, that’s not exactly true, I went there once but they had just closed and I didn’t have a sugar tantrum and try and break the door down as I probably would have done in past years. Long story short, once again, I have proven to myself that objectives/resolutions/goals or whatever you may call them are best achieved when they are realistic and when a clear road map to success is set out. I hope your resolutions are still top of mind for you and if not, perhaps this is yet another opportunity to get re-focused. And if that doesn’t work, just stop by Duck’s kitchen and put yourself into an insulin coma. Hey no worries, Duck can take care of monitoring that too.