A New Year resolution, out there.

2011 is supposed to be my healthy year. In addition to "Reading 24 new books" and some other resolutions, I intend on improving my lifestyle and living healthily. The people who know me know that I eat fattening junk without thinking twice, and know that I cannot be bothered with exercise.

I blame my mother’s genes – she gave me her metabolism. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really not complaining! This inherited attribute is actually one of the very few that I am thankful for. Otherwise, I’ve got all the wrong genes from my parents – I have my father’s nose, my mother’s height, my mother’s skin colour, and so on. Not that all these things are dreadful in any way, it’s just that my mother has a better nose and my father is taller and fair with rosy cheeks, and so on. But at least my mother gave me her metabolism, preventing me from becoming the way I would have eventually if I didn’t have this one advantage. I love it! I never have to worry about what I’m eating and how many calories I’m taking in, and I don’t exercise or hit the gym or anything of that sort. But if I didn’t have that metabolism, I wouldn’t burn as fast as I eat, and I’d be forced to watch what I eat and think about exercise, and not have to write this piece. Which is why I blame my mother’s genes. For all other intents and purposes, yay my mother’s metabolism!

Then one day, in conversation over dinner at Boat Club, a friend who shares this quality of mine pointed out that we may never put on weight, but we could very possibly die of early heart attacks. It may surprise a lot of you that this possibility had never occurred to me. And if it hadn’t been for that friend, I’d have continued living in my bubble and eating utter junk all the time. But then that got me thinking, and I have genuinely started believing that one day, when I’m not much older, my heart is going to start pumping saturated fat instead of blood and I’m going to have my first heart attack at the age of 30 or something.

If you’re laughing, then don’t!

This is where my New Year resolution came to play. To live healthy, and eat sensibly. Again, people who know me know that I cannot resist eating chocolates or any other food that tastes as good as it is unhealthy, and that small quantities do not in any way satisfy my enormous appetite. So it all boils down to making the right choices, I realized that’s the only way I can do it. I choose to wake up early and exercise rather than hitting snooze on that wretched alarm clock, to have a good breakfast so I don’t feel hungry at odd hours even though I’m not really a breakfast person, to eat fruit instead of chips if I feel hungry around teatime, to sleep on time so I can wake up feeling well-rested, and so on.

I feel so much better now, never even realizing that I wasn’t feeling up to the mark. This shift in lifestyle has worked well for me this past one month, and I intend on continuing it. There’s no doubt about that. But this joke always comes to mind when I think about New Year resolutions:

Q. What is a New Year resolution?
A. It’s a to-do list for the first week of January.

Mine has lasted more than just the first week of January; it’s lasted me the whole month. I hope that it lasts me the entire year, so that I can renew it again next year. And that’s the only reason I’m blogging about it – now it’s all outside of me, out on paper. Well, metaphorically anyway. It isn’t just a thing on my mental to-do list, a thing that I can ignore if I want. I now have witnesses, and more than that I have something to come back to if ever I intend on letting go of routine. 2011 is supposed to be my healthy year.

And it will be. You bet your ass it will! Although, I still eat quite a bit of junk.