After years on the self-flagellation/diet/exercise wheel, I have plenty of experience thinking about what I want, what I’m doing right and wrong and what I’ve put in my way in regards to what I’m calling PhysicalFit. As I sat down to write a quick easy piece on my MentalFit goals, I realize I don’t think I’ve ever really done this. I’ve read countless articles and blog posts on exercise and eating right, on setting goals for my body, on backslide and recovery. And now I realize that I haven’t really put that effort in on the rest of my life. The closest I came was a few months of therapy, where the therapist told me to stop trying to do so much and that there is no shame in focusing on a couple goals right now, and saving some of the other things on my life-long-must-do list for “later.”
She was right of course and I knew it of course. But I didn’t really listen to myself or my family when they told me the same thing – I needed to hear it from someone else. Now, maybe it was the “someone else”; this was from a woman with a successful part-time practice who also had a good gig at a local counseling center and was in her mid-30s, happily raising two kids and, from what I could see, balancing her life very comfortably. When SHE told me to calm down and pick somethings to focus on, putting the others on hold, it meant I was hearing approval from someone who had been to the mountain. Or maybe I’m just stubborn and she was just the last voice among many yelling one thing: SIMPLIFY.
So I’m going to take heart at that message. That’s my MentalFit goal. I know that doesn’t meet the specific, measurable and reasonable qualities that goals are “supposed” to have. That maybe the point. Maybe I do need something more defined in practice, but for now I’m going to start by re-emphasizing the goal I’ve always known but rarely acknowledged: SLOW DOWN and SIMPLIFY.
But SkinnyDog helped motivate me and when I traded out for FluffyDog at the end, he got playful and we got to romp around for another 5 minutes instead of doing the 
