A Personal Manifesto

I decided something last night.  I'm tired of feeling unattractive and down about myself, so I'm making a change.  I call it my Happiness and Health manifesto.  I've struggled with my weight and how I look for many years* and I've attached this feeling of attractiveness to how big I feel from day to day.  You know, the bigger I am, the less attractive.  That's been my mentality.  I've known that this is unhealthy for a while, but I'm learning that in order for me to make a mental change, I need to make a physical change.  So today, I made an exercise calendar, a checklist, and a manifesto, which is just a list of general statements to live my life by.

I don't want to make a change just to lose weight, but I ultimately want to feel happier.  Earlier this year, I read The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin and that book has given me a number of ideas on things I can do to be happier and how to keep track of my progress and keep myself accountable.  So I've been trying to utilize some of those ideas.  That's why I've made a weekly checklist of basic things that I can do that I've realized make me happier.  Incidentally, these are also things that I have trouble doing or keeping up with.  Things like socializing or taking time for myself aren't on this list because when I want to do these things, I pursue them.  Things like finishing my reading for school (I don't think I've finished 100% of required texts for any of my classes since freshman year... who can?  There are so many books and texts to read... too many, given the time that I'm given to read everything), exercising every day for half an hour, cleaning my room... things that I do every once in a while, but not nearly as often as I should.  So I'm prioritizing them.

I didn't want to wait until New Years to put this idea into action.  I've learned that unless I do something as soon as I think of it, the idea goes away or lose its luster.  So I must do it now, in the middle of life and school and things like that.  How else will I learn to handle my life with these changes if I don't give myself a strict learning curve?

Let's see how this works.  I hope it yields good results.

Thanks for reading.

--Jude

*It should be noted that these hang-ups of mine aren't so serious where I've needed to receive medical attention.  It's just a thought process that I need to work on reversing.  There's no need to worry, especially now that I'm trying to implement a change.