Going into the New Year, we’ll all be making resolutions of our own. Some will stick with them, and some will drop them by the end of 2017’s first week. Most of those who give up are the infamous dieters. Whether it be Weight Watcher’s, Veganism, whole-foods-only, or even the all powerful and evil lemon and cayenne pepper water cleanse, diets tend to be unsuccessful because they are just too harsh. If your nutrition is in check, but you’re still looking for the perfect New Year’s resolution, try taking a diet from life.
In Ms. March’s new book, The Project of You: Beyond High School, she discusses the similarities of meal planning and life planning in a thought-provoking chapter titled “Do You Like Green Eggs and Ham?” The following is an excerpt from such.
There are foods:
- you love and you know that because you have tried them.
- you don’t enjoy eating but you would likely eat them if they were the only things being served.
- you hate and may not eat even if you are hungry.
- you are allergic to and they are dangerous for you to eat.
- you like but they don’t make you feel well. .
- you have read about and always wanted to try.
Ms. March highlights “trying new foods” as an opportunity to further understand yourself and increase the variety in your life. Beyond high school, there are countless options of careers that you have to choose from. Looking into a new career field is as simple as trying new foods; you just have to be willing to take the first leap. Once you make the decision to consider the options that you usually set aside, you have opened yourself up to something that you may come to love. If this “new food” just isn’t fitting your taste, that’s all right, too! You can at least make some progress by crossing it off of your list of potential choices.
In the same case, it is also very important to understand what “foods” don’t work for you. In this New Year’s life diet, try cutting out everything that simply doesn’t strike a cord with your taste buds. With the given examples having to do with food, that would be bullet points 2-5.
If an aspect of your life does not bring you happiness, there is no point in keeping it around. However, immediately eliminating every “bad food” from your life diet would be too sudden of a change to adjust healthily to. Think back to those extreme diets that fail within the first week, there is no smooth transition, but rather an abrupt attempt at transformation that is doomed to fail. Gradually remove the “foods” in your life that you don’t have a particular liking for, starting with the least offensive ones and working your way up to those god-awful brussel sprouts.
Over time, you will create a new and improved version of your life that better accommodates your happiness- all because you made active decisions to let go of the negative. Now that sounds like a diet I could keep up with.
-Olivia Hunt
marchforwardconsulting 