Every January I get excited to get a new calendar for my cubicle at work. This year I had a hard time choosing between several calendars but finally selected a calendar with the theme - Follow Your Heart.

Easier said than done. I find my biggest problem is not so much the following as the recognizing what my heart is telling me to do. There is a great scene in a movie that I watched with my daughter recently where a woman shows up for an appointment with a psychiatrist that she doesn't really want to be at. As she gets up to leave, she asks the psychiatrist, "If you had to tell someone what the one most useful thing is that that they could do for themselves, what would it be?" The doctor responds, "learn what it is that you really want and how to ask for it."

Ahh January. Such possibilities. A clean slate and a chance to start fresh. A new calendar so uncluttered by commitments and deadlines. All we have to do is figure out what we want to put on it.

Yep. No pressure there. And then you begin to fill in the blanks with tutoring appointments across the suburbs, visits, family and work commitments and suddenly your fitness program is happening between 9:45 pm and 11:30 pm. Well, I guess that is where commitment starts. With us saying, "I need to do this and this is just as important as that and that and that." If we win that argument with ourselves at least some of the time its a step in the right direction. I suppose that we should not expect to unlearn all of our unhealthy habits in a single January.

The January picture on the calendar says to Go Places. I've decided to use the calendar to try to reinforce some healthy habits that have fallen by the wayside as I've assumed a new position at work. So the one place I am going is to new places with my diet. I'm starting slow but I am switching to organic eggs, milk and bread. So you could say the place I am going is organic.

After more than a year of struggling to maintain my weightloss I hit upon the idea that if the food I was eating wasn't satisfying, then I needed to change something. I'm admittedly a bit slower at jumping on the organic fruit and veggie band wagon. I figure if I can do a few small things its better than doing nothing and continuing to over eat stuff I can't even pronounce.

So far I've been happy with this small change. This is good. Brick houses are built brick by brick by brick and every journey starts with a single step out the front door.