Happy New Year!
It's time to set some goals for the year! For 2024, I'm going to try to set some smaller, more frequent goals, rather than aiming for bigger things throughout the year. After reading some of Measure What Matters by John Doerr, I think I'm going to give quarterly goals a shot.
Rather than set multiple goals for the quarter, I'm going to just set one: lose 5lbs by March 31st. Using the OKR method, the key results I'm going to do to accomplish this goals are:
- Do yoga a minimum of 2x a week
- Eat food from a restaurant 1x every two weeks or less (my boyfriend is on board with this, so that's awesome!)
- Avoid eating anything left in the breakroom at work.
When setting this goal, I checked out Precision Nutrition's article on fat loss and muscle gain, which says that if I'm going for an easier transition (which I think is best as I'm still grieving, plus dealing with other life changes), it's reasonable to expect 0.5 lbs of fat lost every week. There are 12 weeks in the quarter, so in theory I could lose a bit more weight than 5lbs. But I'd rather take a slow and steady approach to things, including starting to build some healthier habits.
I decided on this goal because it was the easiest way for me to quantify my ultimate goal of wanting to be healthier. I know I am overweight, and that it's bad for my health in many ways. So losing some weight will be better for me: my joints will be better because they aren't moving as much weight, I will hopefully have a lower fat percentage (which translates into less of a risk of chronic issues), and it will be better for my diabetes as well. I'm also hoping that in pursuing this goal, I will begin to build happier habits, particularly around diet and exercise, so that will also feed into the "be healthier" goal.
And that's why my key results are all focused on starting to be more active and eat a bit better. With the yoga key result, I signed myself up for Asana Rebel a little while ago, and 2x a week is my current goal on there. But rather than limit myself to yoga on the app, I wanted to open this up a bit more to any yoga, since there are other videos I have that I like doing too (especially one for my back that I really like on YouTube). Since signing up for the app, I've been doing yoga at least once a week, and actually have seen myself get a little stronger even from that much, so pushing for the two times a week should be doable.
The restaurant food key result is thanks to eating out a lot with my boyfriend. We've had pizza once a week for the last few weeks, so cutting that back a bit would be great.
The final one, about eating food in the breakroom, is going to take a bit of work on my part: I need to make sure I have some good, healthy snacks to eat instead. I've found that I was doing rather well with not eating stuff in the breakroom until September; my mental health has tanked since that death in my family, and so has my willpower. So actively working to avoid junk food there and bring (and eat) healthier snacks to work instead should help me out a lot right now.
So with that set, I will try to check in once a month to see how things go. But at the very least I will check in at the end of March to assess the goal and set a new one. :)
