Tommorrow I want to tell you about my beautiful new shinny pipe I received for a holiday gift, but today's entry has a different focus. I wish to talk about my plans for 2004.

Today is the start of a brand new day for me (ta-dah!). Or so I hope. As a professor, I have a relatively sedentary lifestyle most of the time. Now, I do move around a great deal while teaching, and lecturing. But, I do not have a very consistent aerobic exercise schedule. My hope is to change that this coming new year. I officially started the routine after a few false fits-and-starts yesterday. I will describe the activities and goals of the exercise routine in a few paragraphs. First, an assessment of my current status:

My weight is slightly overweight, which is a grand improvement over my weight about 6 years ago. When I am stressed, I will immediately want to eat rich (aka unhealthy) food, and that is exactly what I did during a *very * stressful time in my life. However, I was successful in taking the reigns back on my eating and lost roughly 75 pounds six years ago. I have fully adopted and embraced my new relationship with food and have had relatively little fluctuation over the years. The weakness I had in my past effort was that I did not successfully incorporate *consistent* aerobic exercise in my activities. Without the aerobic conditioning, I stayed a bit shy of my true desired weight and body tone.

I am making a vow to myself to now incorporate an enjoyable aerobic and an enjoyable toning workout into my routine 5-6 days each week. I am going to keep the activities variable so that I keep interest, but the general plan is to have one type of toning exercise and one type of aerobic excercise each day (with 1-2 days per week off). The toning exercises I find enjoyable thus far include:

weight training
intensive stretching and flexing
swimming

The aerobic exercises I tend to find most enjoyable include:

brisk walking
bicycling
ice skating
roller blading

Now, I have done all of the above NUMEROUS times in the past several years, but the crux of the issue is HOW DO I MAINTAIN CONSISTENT levels of activity week in and week out. There have been more times than I can count where I will engage in these activities very faithfully for a week or two or sometimes even three, but then these periods are followed by days, weeks or months where life is "too hectic" to exercise. I KNOW this is a load of bullsh*t in reality, and that my goal of this year is to make the exercise as important and mandatory to me as is my time with family, my teaching, my research, my formal writing, or any of the other myriad of activities I engage in.

How do I accomplish this change in heart about the mandatory nature of exercise? I am not 100% sure at the moment, but it is the focus of my semester break this holiday season. As I develop the details over the next week or so, I will bring my insight back to this blog and let you see my findings. In the meantime, I am happy to receive any comments you may have.

I will, though, focus on telling you about my beautiful new pipe my wife purchased for me. It is a true, artistic beauty, and It is such a grand beast that it deserves its own day's entry.

Pipe Tobacco