A twisted view.....

Wow!  The new year is upon us all!  Say goodbye to 2010 and hello to 2011.

What comes to mind when the beginning of a new year is upon us?

Some see it as an opportunity to party like a maniac with friends and family.  Others see it as an opportunity to have a fresh start.  Most make resolutions to challenge themselves to be thinner, to quit smoking, to make going to the gym a ritualistic thing.

As for me...  It is random thoughts and wondering with a touch of making a resolution...

Resolutions are just high expectations with a time limit.  After all the holiday feasts, going on a diet is an obvious choice.  I try each year, but quit after a few months.  My cravings for junk food, chocolate and sometimes beer are my recipe for failure.  I know, I know....  Moderation is the key.  Diets don't work.  Getting to a healthy or even ideal weight is going to take a lifestyle change if you really want it.  I know that I am a weak person because I let everything effect my journey to get back into a single digit size of jeans.

It is really hard to eat healthy when everything has gone to crap.  The economy has got our household in a pinch.  Being on a budget makes it real hard to buy healthier choices if you can't get them with coupons.  A majority of the foods we eat are either hormone injected or chemically processed for the masses.  I watched Food, Inc. and I am even a bit leery about what we eat.

I am in the midst of looking for another job to help my family financially.  We are on the verge of going under if we are not careful in how we manage our money.  Finding a job is like trying to find Waldo.  I am a hairdresser, by trade, and I can easily find a job at another salon, but the service industry is suffering.  Earning commission is a feast or famine world and we have been starving.  Finding a job that pays an hourly wage takes a college degree unless you like flipping burgers. There was a time I was qualified to work in an office, but since the crash in the economy, employers are looking for people that they do not need to train.  I have been out of that loop for years and there are plenty of people very qualified to fill those jobs.  Entry level is the thing of the past.  The stress of it all makes me crave chocolate in the worst way....  Not the healthiest of food choices.

Everything we do takes some form of conscious thought.  We work to make money so we can have the basic necessities.  We think about what we wear, we think about what we say (more so when it comes to me), we think about what we eat (some more than others), we make decisions all the time.  When our thought process is squashed by our environment, or in this case, economy, we tend to be less than optimistic.

Does the new year posses some kind of magic that everything will get better?  Nope.  January 1st is just the start of the new calendar year.  All the strife and struggle is still there.  We just look at it differently, we enter it with hope.  So why make a resolution to make your changes at the start of the calendar year?  It just creates hype and then disappointment.  I should know.  I have failed every resolution I have ever made.  This year is different.  I am not making a resolution.  You can't fail a resolution if you never made one :)

When it comes to my journey of losing weight, I am just going to try and keep trying.  I have to work with what I have because I know that 2011 is not going to be great if I do not put any effort into it.

Hopefully, 2011 is the year that we even get out of this economic funk, the government stops drowning us in debt, jobs for all, and the resurrection of the American Dream.  A girl can dream, right?

Happy New Year everyone :)