2017 Goals

Happy new year, everyone!  Let's get this party started, with my goals for the coming year:

1. Lose three pounds each month.
   This is a big one for me, and I'm scaling it back from last year's goal of a pound a week since I didn't even meet that one halfway. ;)  I should be able to do three pounds a month - it's 50% more than what I achieved last year, and I think it's attainable.  It will be a lot of work though, and I need to break through this year finally.  
2. Work out at least 20 days a month.
   I'm changing this up for 2017.  Last year, my goal was 20 workouts a month, and on 29 days, I did two or more workouts for a total of 316 workouts.  Awesome achievement, but I think I need to go for more consistency perhaps?  I'm still going to count the number of workouts though, because I'm a data dork. ;)
3. Hit my 10,000 steps a day average over the month.
   Now that I rejoined the land of the pedometer, I've been keeping track of my steps again.  Frustratingly though, it's not a perfect measurement of my activity, especially when dancing.  (I typically earn around 6k steps during a 60 minute dance class, but would walk more steps in 60 minutes usually.)  If I work out 20 days in the month, that will help but it will still require more activity on the rest of the days too!
4. Cook one new (and healthy!) recipe a month.
   Need to keep expanding my culinary horizons, and add more healthy options to my mental cookbook.  
5. Make gratitude a priority.
   Gratitude: "the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness."  The past two years, I've kept a "happy" file on my phone where I write something that made me happy each day.  I'm going to keep doing that, but overall I want to put more of an emphasis on sharing gratitude daily.  I'm very blessed and want to help share love and smiles and health to others. 

Here's to a happy and healthy 2017 for us all!