Thoughts on New Years Resolutions

Welcome to 2014! It’s been exactly one week since New Years. What comes with New Years? New Year Resolutions, new goals, more ambition, more drive, and you wanting to become a better person. 90% of the goals is to lose weight and become healthier. How are you doing on your resolutions so far? Hitting the gym every day of this week? A calendar is just a calendar. Between December 31^st & January 1^st, you are not a different person. You don’t magically transform overnight. You do not develop magic skills overnight to conquer your goals. But “The New Year, New Me” idea can be a useful tool to motivate yourself to start doing something and actually change your life. The reason I am making this blog post is because I want you to succeed. My goal is to give you some great tips that and my perspective to help you in any way.

1) Get a partner. Get someone who will go to the gym with you on a consistent basis. There is going to be a lot of days when you do not want to go to the gym for numerous reasons. Some days just do not go your way. You might be beat down from work or school. It is easy to give yourself an excuse not to go to the gym. It is easy to give up and quit on yourself.  But it’s really hard to quit on someone else. Don’t be that person, don’t let your gym partner down. Your partner is relying on you even if you had a bad day. By having a partner, chances are, he/she will drag you to the gym anyways. They will help you get through the workout. Return the favor when your partner doesn’t want to go. Make sure that you are actually being productive while at the gym and don’t slack off. Afterwards do not go eat something unhealthy or drink sugary tea/coffee to ruin your results.

2) If you do have a problem, go workout anyways. After working out, you will have a whole new and better perspective how to deal with that problem. You will have so much more confidence, more energy, less stress, and you will make a better decision because you now have a better feeling of accomplishment. You will have a better outlook on the same problem two hours later, trust me.

3)  Don’t overwhelm yourself and expect to be perfect on day 1. Habits become lifestyles. Work on developing good habits one at a time. Don’t rush. When you overwhelm yourself, you will burn out quick, and that’s a recipe for failure. On January 1^st, lifting weights, eating perfect, drinking a gallon of water, running 5 miles a day, and sleeping 8 hours is not realistic. All of those things add up quick, and coming from a lifestyle of doing none of these to jumping into everything, expecting to be perfect, and continuing on is extremely difficult. Imagine someone trying to write a book. It’s a huge task. They do everything they can to subconsciously put it off. The thought of writing a book is overwhelming. But if you focus on that one chapter a month, those chapters will add up quick. You will keep going because you kept feeding off your success. This is why having one goal at a time is important. Conquer that goal and make it part of your lifestyle. Repeat the same process with the next goal.                                                      

4) Track your results. This is imperative. When you start living this lifestyle, you will see that this takes time and patience. Trust the process. Ignore the infomercials on loosing ridiculous amounts of weights in 2 weeks. There’s no such thing as “6 pack abs” in 6 minutes. Crash diets are a joke. Easy come, easy go. If any of these gimmicks would work, two thirds of our country would not be overweight. The beauty of this process is that this is a marathon, not a sprint. You will look good after working out, but it is a byproduct of something much more. It is much more important being healthy, feeling good, having clear mind, and wanting to accomplish other goals. If you are working out solely to impress other people, you are doing yourself a disservice. Eating right and working out is a transformation of who you are. You will become a better person, more knowledgeable, with more confidence. This is especially a hard concept to gasp for me, as I imagine for other pageant girls out there, but you have to work out for yourself. You can’t have that “I want to look good in a bikini on stage” as a sole motivation to lose weight. Be patient, sometimes results won’t come till 4-6 weeks. Let your body adjust and heal itself before you will see the fruits of your labor. As soon as you see results, it becomes exciting and no longer be a chore. Working out will become a part of you and you will develop a passion for it. You will be proud to call yourself  a “gym rat”. Take progress pictures. Track how much weight you can now lift. Those tips will help your mind realize that you are making progress.

Doesn't matter who you are, or where are you starting, you just have to start. Everyone at the gym is in there for the same reason, don’t feel intimidated. We all started somewhere. We all have different history and backgrounds. You can’t buy health but health is the foundation of your success and well being. When you are feeling great, you want to go work on your skills/goals instead of being a couch potato. You can’t buy a great body. You can’t buy confidence. You can’t get that “high on life” feeling unless you achieve your goal. Those things have to be earned. Remember that time will pass either way, why not make it a year where you improve your mind, body, and soul? Think about how many things you can do per day to improve yourself. Now times that by 365 days. Try focusing on becoming 1% better every single day. Imagine where you are going to be in year from now!

Why I don't Drink & Crab in the Bucket story

Today, I wanted to talk about why I don’t drink alcohol. Yes, I am 21 and I have had alcohol before. But with holidays coming around, hopefully I can inspire some healthier choices in your life. I wanted to share with you my opinion and why I choose not to drink and my perspective on alcohol.  Please keep in mind that I have absolutely no judgment or problems with anyone having a drink once in a while! If you have a glass of wine once in a while, and it fits with your goals, more power to you. If this is your perspective of having a good time and relaxing with your family is, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It’s definitely not for me. I like to work hard to achieve my goals and alcohol gets in the way of doing that.

1) I have this perspective of how my life should be in my head. I envision success and have this image that I like to portray. I have this idea of how I would like my life to be right now, and what I would like my life to be in the future. Every single action that I take is either getting me closer to my goal or further away from my goals. When I drink, I feel like I could use that time more wisely and work towards my goals and aspirations.

2)  It makes me feel not as optimal. I like living a healthy lifestyle and encourage others to do the same. I believe in “living what you are preaching” kind of lifestyle. Even though most people won’t see it, or wouldn't know if I actually went to the bars every weekend and got “smashed”, in my mind, I would like to  stay as authentic as I possibly can. I would like to stay genuine and actually set a good example. Alcohol affects your performance in the gym. I am not trying to be an Olympic athlete, but every month I try to get better. I try get faster, get stronger, build up my endurance, and do one more extra rep. I try to be the best version of myself that I possible can be. Drinking alcohol sets you back a couple of days of becoming a better version of myself. I would lose those two days when I could be progressing. If you can drink all night and still get up the next morning and feel just fine, then go for it. That’s not how my body works, so I choose not to drink.

3)  My background is Russian. Unfortunately, alcoholism’s runs in my family. I have directly seen how alcohol can effect someone’s body, life, and relationships. I have an uncle who is an alcoholic, and is currently half disabled because of it. My sister’s dad is an alcoholic, who is a violent jerk who would rather be drunk then to see his daughter visiting once every five years from another country. My grandma’s siblings and their families are just jerks and have to have a drink at every meal. I’ve seen people who would rather buy a bottle before they buy bread. And worst of all, I’ve seen my mother trying to end her life while being drunk at one point in her life. This is not okay in my mind. With having to see so much alcoholism in my life, it really put me in a complete opposite direction. I don’t like how alcohol effects your body, don’t like being drunk, and don’t like drunk people. I bet no one can give me an example of how alcohol saved someone’s life or helped them in any way to become successful.

So the question is how can you maintain a social life without drinking? When you go out with your friends, out in a bar, or out at a house, your friends try to convince you to have a drink.  When you respectively decline, your friends get a little judgmental, and a bit pushy, and start pressuring you into having just have “one drink”.  Here’s how I solve this problem. First of all, offer to drive when you get invited out. That gives you the awesome “ I am driving” excuse. You can even lie further if needed, and say you can’t even have one drink because it will takes you too long to sober up. Always order a club soda, or ice water, and have the actual glass in your hand. Put a lemon wedge and a straw to make it fancy looking. If your friends get really pushy, remember the crab story. If you never heard of a crab story, here it is. It’s an actual truth. If you put one crab in a bucket, it will escape. When you put a bunch of crabs in a bucket, and one tries to get out, to succeed in “crabland” and do awesome “crab things”, all the other crabs will try to grab and hold one to each other and pull each other back into the bucket. Those kind of friends who are really pushy, are not your real friends and chances are, they have wrong intentions for wanting you to drink. 

I hope that you learned something. This is what my experience has been in the past year of me living on my own. I learned so many lessons, and this was one of them.