I managed to have the New Year’s Eve I’d wanted, just me and my DH home alone, romantic and cool, cooking, snuggling, enjoying each other and our house. Naked.

We ate a LOT of very good and very fattening foods. Caviar (him). Giant Alaskan King Crab legs with lemon butter (me) and homemade mayonnaise (him). A fabulous duck breast that I cooked myself. Roasted winter veggies (kholrabi, beet, parsnip). 2 bottles of wine (neither one finished, don’t worry!) . Fabulous and wild desserts by Pierre Herme, including a slice of the black truffle buche, a truffle macaron, several other macarons, and a few other of his wonderful desserts .

A very nice way to spend the evening. The food fest is over now, time to get serious again.

I spent a lot of time these past few days working on my Best Year Yet 2008 plan. I did the exercises more thoroughly than in the past few years and gleaned plenty of new insights.

Here are my top 10 goals for 2008 :

  1. Have a healthy baby
  2. Nurture my marriage (build the couple at least 2x/wk)
  3. Slowly but continuously lose weight
  4. Keep up my weight loss blog
  5. Get my French driver’s license
  6. Master AdminisTrivia – personal & professional {I am an administrative mess, both personally and professionally, and I need to beat this}
  7. Cook regularly
  8. Catch up on nagging old projects (wedding photos, scrapbook, etc)
  9. Be moving into next job by early 2009 at latest
  10. Keep a personal activities accomplishment list for 2008 (do at least 2 items per month) {this includes books read, movies seen, museums visited, etc}

This year was a very interesting project. My number 1 goal, to have a healthy baby, was as I expected, but I changed the wording several times on some of the others, and was surprised to see things that I’d had on the list for a long time drop off, and things I’d never listed make it to the top 10 (administrative tasks, cooking). The other good thing is several things I’d been putting off due to the hassle factor have now gotten “offical top goal” status which should help them get completed - including the horrible process of the French drivers license and a bunch of old “should do them” projects around the house. All of those things put a negative drain on my energy by not being done, and I want to live with a clearer conscience. I was also surprised to see the determined side to change jobs in about a year’s time…

There are 3 goals that are direct links to my weight loss effort. First is to lose weight slowly but consistently. I *think* I will be doing that via Low Stress Weight Loss & my work with Dr Hope, but if that approach doesn’t work for me, I’ll try something else. At first I wrote that following Low Stress Weight Loss was the goal and then I thought about it and realized it’s the method but not the goal.

I also made keeping this blog into a full-fledged goal. It’s pointing myself in the right direction. Making a long-term commitment to keeping a focus on my weight. I know when I get busy or stressed it’s easy to skip it, but I find the thinking needed to have regular blog posts is really helpful to ME. I also love the community of support and the interaction w comments, which is what pushes it to be more helpful & interesting than just keeping a diary. Plus more accountable.
Finally, cooking. I choose to make cooking “regularly” a goal because I think it will be a good thing for various aspects of my life. I think it will be appreciated by my DH (who does most of the cooking now). It is also one of the best ways to control my diet (my DH cooks with lots of fat). It’s also creative and can be fun, and is helpful in the context of the Dr Hope exercises of thinking about what I really want and satisfaction and all of that. I gave myself plenty of leeway with the word “regularly” because I didn’t want to be too rigid with a certain number of times per week, but the idea is to cook frequently.

Well, that sums up my outlook for 2008.

Hope you all have a great year!