Monthly Archives: October 2013

End Year Resolutions

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Smallish, roundish, cutish and a little rough around the edges– these are my kiddos. Oh wait, they’re actually their pumpkins. Happy Halloween from one very excited duo.

Yes, we enjoy all that the season has to offer. Costumes, carvings and candy galore! I admit to dipping into the stash, and my kids know that they are required to acquire m&m’s for me. It’s like paying a trick-or-treating tax for which I am the collector.

In the nutrition world Halloween wreaks havoc. It’s not the one night of gluttony, but the feeling for many that from here to the end of the year it’s one temptation after the next. Just the other day one of my clients panicked about a current trend and what it means for the holiday season: having alcohol causes her to loosen her guard and stray from her goals. From one unstructured evening she can tumble downward for several days until she can refocus. And so goes the cycle.

The solution is easier said than done: don’t drink.

I posed a challenge. Go dry for the season, as an athlete might when gearing up for peak fitness. It’s two months–not a lifetime. It’s not just a strategy to balance intake, it’s also a commitment to focus on goals. It’s a resolution to end the year on top of the game and not to begin the next by scrambling from the bottom.

Hence the End Year Resolution. Don’t wait for the New Year to make plans and take action. Register for a race date in January, rather than waiting until January to identify one. And this goes well beyond nutrition and fitness, by the way. What can you do over the next two months to affect change within yourself? Within your family? Within your community?

Perhaps you have a high-flying adventure to capitalize on– oh wait, that’s me. (More on that when it happens, and I guess this commits me to following through before January 1). Or perhaps you will prepare to voluntarily pull yourself off of sabbatical to focus on the actual publication of a book– oh wait, me again. And where oh where might nutrition fit in…

New projects to come in the New Year, and with that my blogging will take a different direction– to be decided in the End Year. Stay tuned!

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Dark Side of Neverland

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Never send me to Neverland. It’s filled with souls who refuse to grow up. And boy are we experiencing some growing pains. It hasn’t been our shining week. The principal to whom one of my kids was sent assures me that “it’s all a process.” By that does she mean a process though which I might lose my mind? Then my other kiddo had an altercation which required words with the teacher. Now I know for certain where I have been sent: Never-Lord-of-the-Flies-Land.

In this magical place I am trying to govern with limited success. Here, where mermaids are adored and loin clothes are sported, good spars with evil, yielding an uncertain outcome each and every time. Daily I am left to wonder if civilization and righteousness are taught or inherited?

I look at my son who admittedly makes a darling Peter Pan. Note, I did not choose to share the photo in which he depicts Peter Pan’s death scene, with foam dagger situated across throat and arrow positioned in a rather unfortunate, not to mention sensitive, area. Lord of the Flies indeed.  I wonder about innocence and promise; can they be maintained, and moreover, if they are lost can they be reclaimed?

It’s impossible not to think of my father on this day, which marks three years since his passing. I remember him at his finest– an individual of grace and integrity. He was larger than life, but at some point, as proved by fantastic black-and-white photos he, too, had been young and impressionable, testing personas from cowboy to boy scout. I see my son in those photos, and I see my father in my son. Should he be so lucky to turn his own measure of promise into a life so fulfilled .

I’d love to know if my father had any mischievous moments or perhaps a meeting with the principal? Let’s pretend it was possible, because then I’d have hope that we might eventually depart Never-Lord-of-the-Flies-Land with innocence intact and promise to nurture. Whether we decide to grow up or we wait for rescue we will emerge having conquered the process.