Sunday, December 31, 2017

Tomorrow Begins a New Year

New Year, New Start


Tomorrow begins a New Year, and I'm going to begin my journey to health anew.

A Goal to Aim For


In the past I've said I don't make New Year's resolutions, because of how often they are broken, but today at church my pastor said something that stuck with me, now he said it about daily Bible reading and prayer in the new year, and no doubt it applies to that, but really it applies to anything one needs to accomplish.

What he said was this, he compared setting a goal to playing darts.  There is the dart board, the target, and of course the bulls-eye is what you are aiming for, worth 10 points, or 100%.  Maybe as you aim for the bulls-eye, you don't hit it, maybe you hit the ring around the bulls-eye instead, and that ring isn't a perfect 10, but its worth 9 points, or 90%, and that's okay. Or maybe you don't even make that ring, maybe you only hit the ring worth 8 points,  or 5 points, still 80% or 50% of the goal is better than nothing.



One thing is for sure he said, if, rather than aiming at the bulls-eye, you don't even aim at the board, you aren't going to to hit the board.  Another way to put it, he said, is that if you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time.

Perfection isn't necessary.


With that in mind, I am setting goals.  I am aiming for the bulls-eye of getting down to 190 by the end of the year.  I may hit that goal, or I may not, but I am sure that I will come closer to it by aiming for it than I will if I aim at nothing.

Tomorrow, I will go into more details about the steps I plan to take to aim for that bulls-eye. I think I should list mini-goals at the start of every week, and at the end of the week report how I did.

For now though, here are my starting stats:

Highest Weight ever was 291 on May 5, 2017
Weight right now: 286.1
Tomorrow I will also list my blood pressure and body fat percentage, but for now I think this is enough.

Oh, and by the way, I also plan to apply the pastors advice to Bible reading and prayer, with a goal to read the Bible and pray every day in 2018. Will I hit the bulls-eye and read every single day perfectly?  Maybe. Maybe I'll only read 90% of the days, or 80%, but surely I'll read more of the word and spend more time in prayer if I am trying for every day, than I would if I didn't have a goal at all.

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