I have included a short term, goal, a mid term goal and a long term goal.
My main Mid term goal at the moment is to improve my physical health (while maintaining my currently quite good level of mental health) as I had some test results from the doctor recently that were a bit sobering.
The main thing I am being advised to do is 'lose weight' - however this has been a real struggle for me for many years as I developed quite bad eating disorders in my teens, running the gamut from anorexia to bulimia and in my 20s I developed BED and gained LOT of weight while stopping my self harming behaviours. Since then I have had good spells where my weight plataeus, or drops, and bad spells where it shoots up again.
Dieting/weighing/measuring/counting cal's are all really triggering things for me and can quickly derail my mental health, which in turn derails the rest of my life, including my physical heath, something it is VERY difficult to get people to understand. They really keep on pushing 'but you are too fat to be healthy!!' while failing to grasp that the process of losing weight can, if not handle carefully, result in me becoming actually quite a lot MORE unhealthy.
Instead of ficusing on losing weight I have to work on building UP exercise (Couch to 5 k is my current quest and I was doing great before being struck down with this horrible Flu that is going around, can't wait to get back to it!). I have a pedometer and aim for a minimum of 10K steps per day. I like body metric tracking and like to log my activity/steps/active heart rate/b-pressure/recovery heart rate and so on. These are metrics I can safely track without 'triggering' me, and help to keep me motivated.
I also listen to hypnotic/NLP tracks that support healthier eating habits, such as paying attention to hunger and satiety cues, eating mindfully, and responding to strong emotions in more appropriate/useful ways than by self medicatng with food.
I am a LOOOOONG way off the final result, but by focussing on developing/adding in good supportive behaviours (such as activity levels) I can see on any given day that I have achieved a small aspect of what I am aiming for.
My longest term goal is to get the mortgage paid off. This has been an EXPENSIVE year with many unanticipated vet bills and other expenses and essentially we lost 2 years worth of progress. Ooof. That was rough. So now I am all about trying to squeeze the most out of a dollar and trying to get some momentum back on that score.
Budgeting is all very well but sticking to it is a challenge! I have a tin that I put all of my loose change in, and I am bumping that up to include $5 notes too.... that way I seldom have cash handy to impulse spend.
Well officially I have another 27.5 years on this mortgage....
Short term goal in the next couple of weeks I am trying to build some additional garden beds in my back yard. I love gardening and am slowly pulling together a bit of an urban homestead - my goal is to have fruit trees, berries and olives in addition to my herb garden and vegie beds. I'm sort of recreating in miniature my grandfather's farm where I spent my happiest days of childhood, ad alas long since sold away.
I need to measure the area, decide on how high I want the beds (one sleeper or two?), order the lengths of timber, buy some screws/brackets and get to building. Hopefully it will MOSTLY involve drilling holes and drilling in screws which I can manage. Once they are built I need to order in soil/compost and mulch and do a LOT of shovelling...... (Should help with my Mid term goal above at least!)
Measuring is the first step and one I have been putting off forever. I have no idea why it seems like so much hassle, but it does. If I could use a power saw I could just eyeball it and cut the wood to the right length, but as it is I need to order all the different lengths I need precut.
I am probably only a month away from having thse beds built and at least partly planted out.
