The Third Goals

I have met all of my First Goals: I have a daily physical activity of walking at least a half mile to a mile each day and I have 3 social groups with church, gaming group, and neighbors. I have met the Second Goals because I have this blog, facebook, two positive online communities, and a regular round of information that I read online. Things are stable enough to add another couple of goals.

Third Goal number one is to organize my apartment in such a way that it is very easy to keep clean. I do pretty well with the basic hygeine kinds of things, but I want things to be as nice as possible, and I want it to be easy to do, so that when I get depressed again it will still be possible to follow an established routine. The easier I can make it, the more likely it will be done. It will also make my home more enjoyable and help me feel better about living here. I would like to be able to fix it up a little.

Third Goal number two is to lose at least 50lbs in 2011. I would like to lose more, but 1 pound per week is something that is almost certainly do-able even within my physical and mental limitations. I plan to do this by maintaining the exercise that I started as one of the First Goals in an effort to help my depression, and also recording everything I eat over at Sparkpeople.com. I will use Sparkpeople.com as an aid to losing weight by participating in the community there and taking advantage of all the articles and tools they have to help.

I've lost weight and kept it off by changing my anti-psychotic from Seroquel to Saphris and by changing the way I eat. But I've lost all the weight I'm going to lose just from those changes, so it's time to work at it.

Third Goal number 3 will be taking an aspirin and some nutritional supplements every day. I am not a believer in magic beans, but there are some studies about fish oil and B vitamins that seem to be sound, so I am going to make that part of my routine. It won't make me less healthy, and it might help prevent heart disease and other damage from diabetes, so I'm going to do it.

Thus, I find that I have the mental and physical resources to introduce a new set of goals, now that the previous ones have become habits.