I have been a vegetarian of sorts for around a year. It has been a slow process to get to where I am at now. I don’t eat any meat except for seafood so I am actually a pescetarian. I usually just say vegetarian when asked, “What are you?” It is that or  human.

Becoming a Vegetarian

The journey has been slow because it started with a personal dare and has evolved through education. I think it has been at least 3 years since I last ate beef. I decided that I would not eat beef for a month just to see if I could do it – a test of will. The man in my life laughs when I describe it this way because I often eat a cup full of ice cream after dinner for a week without blinking an eye. Will power is ignored for ice cream. I decided to start with beef because I didn’t eat it that much to begin with. After a month of easily not eating beef I felt confident that I could be in control of other food items. I was a bit over weight at the time and it seemed nice to know I could be in control. I recently read that will power is like a muscle and you have to use it to make it stronger. I love that idea because it eliminates any excuses.

Feeling better with less meat

Anyway…I started to feel great and it gave me something to practice. My friend gave up all meat except for seafood a few years ago and the more we started to cook meals for one another the more I noticed that after a meal free of chicken and beef the calmer and more relaxed I felt. I have no medical studies to back this up, just personal feeling. It could be the fact that I don’t have guilt or sad feelings for the animals, the fact that cleaning up dishes is so much easier when I’m not cooking with meat, or that I get more vitamins and things my body needs (such as Omega-3 fatty acids) from vegetables and seafood.  I have slept better, had more energy, and felt more myself without meat.

Helping Others with Changes

My cousin wanted to talk about my change this Christmas. He had really struggled with the switch and had gone back to meat without finding much success. Changing to a diet with less meat or no meat is very personal. I found great success and would recommend that you try it if you are looking for a change. It has taught me control and allowed me to see food in a more positive way.

Readers: Do you feel like you have control over your diets?  Have you thought about becoming a vegetarian or helping someone else change their diet?  Do you consider a diet to be something temporary, or a permanent lifestyle change?

As I write this, it’s the 20th of January, and I’ve been to the gym (or working out) for 19 days straight (I knew I wasnt going to the gym on new years day).  This is surely the longest tracked streak, and probably up there in terms of length in all my bouts of going to the gym.  I’ve found that the best time for me to go the gym is in the morning before work.  Admittedly, it’s not always easy to go to the gym at this hour but I make it happen on about 5-6 days during the week.  I usually give myself one day off during the week in the morning, and I run that afternoon.

The one thing that I’ve been noticing is that it sucks getting up all the time.  I’m not talking about waking up, I’m talking about taking the action of getting out of bed.  We all know that getting out of bed is probably the worst thing ever  - and even more so when the weather is cold.  After my battles in december with myself on getting out of bed (which I mostly lost) I gave my workouts more thought around christmas time and I knew that I had to figure out some sort of gimmick  to get myself out of bed, because once I’m out of bed and ambulatory, I do just fine and make it to the gym.

I settled on the easy workout.  I do a series of 4 workouts, two muscle groups at a time except for one day where I just do one.  The workout where I just do 1 muscle group rotates, but the workout is always the same: legs.  This workout takes way less time and isn’t nearly as rigorous as the rest of my workouts.  So whenever I wake up and I’m having a lot of trouble making it out of bed, I just tell myself that I’m doing the legs workout that day, and after a minute or two I drag myself out of bed.  Even though I may not actually end up doing the easy work out, getting out of bed is all that matters (for me).  Once I’m out of bed, I’ll grab one of the scraps of paper I’ve got my workouts written on and head off to the gym, and it usually isnt the easy workout, I usually save that for the end of the week.  I dont want to “burn” it on a monday.

The thing is, once I can get out of bed, I know that I could get to the gym, so I’ve learned to leverage that.  I know that once I’m out of bed, I can get to the gym, so I’ve been trying to trick myself every day that I dont want to get out of bed (this is about 1 of every 3 days).  I tell myself that I’m doing the easy workout (wether I am not) and that helps me get out of bed and head to the gym.

Readers: Do you use special tricks to get yourself to workout, or do you just try and force yourself all the time?  Do you think something like that would work for you?  If so, what habit(s) could you leverage (like my not getting back in bed after I get up) to make this goal a success?

Since it’s the first week of 2012, I figured that I’d share my goals for 2012 with all of you.  I don’t list every goal in every category, but I do put the ones that I feel relate to the things we talk about on the blog.

Every year for the past 6 years, I’ve created goals for myself.  I wasnt too good with the tracking thing in  the early years, but I’ve gotten better recently.  (also, while editing my goals posts, I wrote I’d been having goals for different amounts of time in every post i’d written).  I decided to break up my goals into categories last year, and I’m doing the same this year.  The following are my goals for getting/staying healthy throughout the year.

This year of course comes with a little added incentive because I’m getting married.  While I dont mind looking like a tool at my wedding, I dont want to be overweight or unfit – in fact, just the oppisite.  I’d rather be in the best shape of my life, or close to it anyway.  Hopefully the goals I’ll set will help with that.

The first health goal for the year will be to run a marathon.  I don’t really think this will be that difficult.  Im a very function oriented person (if X, then Y) so my plan is to pick a marathon that I’d like to do before the wedding and then follow a simple training program.  I’ve already found a training program that i’d like to do, and have identified a few marathons that I’d like to do (both are in june, providing me 6 full weeks to get really fat before my wedding).  I think that H may run it with me, but she’s only interested in running a half marathon, so her training wont be quite as extensive as mine, but at least I’ll have a training buddy.  As far as I’m concerned though, I just have to follow the steps on my training program week in and week out, and I’ll be fine.  That may be simplistic thinking, but I dont need to get all worked up over it.  As of right now, I’m looking at 2 races, both in the beginning of june pretty hard, and one potentially in may, but it is a trail run so I’m not sure that I’m quite up for that yet.

The next health goal is slightly subjective (which makes for a poor goal) but I’m going for it anyway.  H and I will be spending plenty of time lounging around on the beach during our honeymoon, and obviously I dont want to look like a troll.  Unfortunately, there’s no way I’ll look as good as she will, but either way I’d like to be in good shape for my honeymoon.  How I’ll define this I havent figured out yet, but hopefully I’ll come up with something.

I’d also like to eat more veggies.  Next summer, H and I are going to be getting veggies in our CSA along with our friut, and I’d like to make sure that none of that ends up in the compost heap.  In order to do this, I’ll need to eat more veggies next year, both as snacks and sides, as well as main dishes.  So, one of my goals for next year will be to eat vegetarian at dinner 3 times per week.

I think that those goals should keep me occupied in the health sector for a while, and nothing looks like it will be too difficult (other than following the plan).  One thing I was told to watch out for is my marathon – It seems like there are quite a bit of injuries during training for a race, so I’ll need to watch out for that.

Readers:  What are your health goals for the coming year?  Do you have health goals, or are you simply trying to maintain what you’ve got?  Are you goals focused on weight-loss or something different?  

It’s getting towards the end of the year, and it’s a great time to review the goals that I had for the year and how I fared with them.  I put some of my goals up on the site, and you can find them here.  I’ve also been doing some quarterly updates that you can read if you’re curious (Q1, Q2, Q3) but this is the final one  for this year, and soon will come goals out for 2012.  While I didnt put my goals all on the website, I did put goals for my finances and my health on here.  Goals not included were either mean to be a surprise or were not relevant to the topics on this blog, so I left them off.  So, without further ado, here were my goals and how I fared with them in 2011.

Financial Goals

1. Pay off my Direct Loan.  The balance for this loan as of 12/31/10 will be right around $4,250.   While this wont help out my cash flow that much, it’s still by far the lowest loan balance  that I have.  I’m hoping that this will be paid off in Q1, and it should be if I can get back to my gazelle intensity that I lost in December.

Success!  I had a pretty ambitious goal of paying this off in the first quarter, but was rudely woken up when tax season came around.  I ended up using money that was supposed to be for debt repayment to pay both state and federal income tax.  After that, it was mostly traveling during the summer that ate up my extra money for loan payments, and once I was finally ready to pay it off, they lost the check.  Eventually (mid november) I was able to pay it in full.

1. Pay Off Truck.  This goal is going to be a heavy lift, but I think that I can do it this year.  I’ve been debating if I should pay this off first or move on to the next lowest balance.  In the end, the truck is going to win out because of the amount of cash that it’s going to free up.  The balance on this note as of 12/31/10 is $17,979.

Fail!  Although I knew last year that this would probably be a bit too far out of reach, I decided to put it on here anyway so even if I ended up failing, i’d be pretty far ahead of where I was supposed to be.  I didnt make extra payments on the loan, but got a huge insurance check from a hail storm and was able to put that towards the value of the loan.  After borrowing 21,000 in December of 2009, The loan balance is near 9,000 now, which I’m more than fine with.  I originally financed the note for 6 years, but it should be long gone before then.

Everyday, my awesome readers (and most days I) do difficult things.  We have to turn a lot of things down in the name of staying healthy or saving some money.  A lot of people think this is literally devastating.  You’ve got to have 0 fun for a very long time.  No free spending, no eating chocolate bars every day.  Red even had a post about it recently.  Here’s what she had to say:

I know what you’re thinking. But diets are the WORST! Who wants to go on a diet? No one! Diets mean no fun!

I think she did a pretty good job of summing up why people hate budgets and diets right there.  The thing is, it doesnt have to be that way.  Getting healthy is more about lowering and/or removing bad habits from your life, not having no fun every single day and not eating candy for 15 months straight.  A lot of people think it will be that way, and it can – if you make it like that.  But, like red and every person who has ever tried that ever in the history of trying things knows – that way sucks.  It’ll work for a while (possibly longer if you’re really determined) but eventually, you’ll slip up just once.  Once that happens, you’re falling off a cliff, breaking all of your other newly formed positive habits on the way down.  What you need to do to make it easy is give yourself a free pass on things that you really, really like, up to a certain number of times in a given time period (say 2x/month).  I’ll show you how this works in my own life.  It’s honestly much easier than the “give up something pretty good forever” method.

This idea came to me at the financial bloggers conference, when I was really, really dragging sunday morning.  I had just spent quite a bit of time in alaska and had gone right to work after I landed in the town where I live.  My flight back was a redeye (11pm AK time to 10am MST) and I dont sleep on the plane.  I worked 2 half days and friday it was time to head to the conference.  H and I had a good friend pick us up from midway and was supposed to take us straight to the hotel – we had a few beers first, and didnt even check in until 2am sat.  Up for the conference at 730 and ready to go, I really started dragging then too.  I went for a run, which helped.  After another 2am night on saturday night, there was no getting around it sunday – I was absolutely beat.  Durning morning break, I went by the coffee shop in the hotel to see if I could get some caffeine.  I know, I know, I gave up caffeine almost a year and a half ago, so what was I doing?

Well, I didnt totally give it up, I just gave up drinking a lot of it.  I dont let myself get caffeine much, and when I do, I want to get what I like, which is coke.  No, pepsi’s not OK – coke or nothing.  I was mentioning this to Sarah from the 60k project and Eric from Narrow bridge and they agreed with me.  So what we are saying is that based on a survey of practically everyone, coke > pepsi!  This was all part of my plan a few months after I gave up caffeine and I realized that sometimes I just needed it to stay awake or do whatever.  I really, really like coke so I figured if I could have that, I’d drink it if I really felt like I needed caffeine.  If they didnt have coke, I’d just get water and deal with it.

I havent been keeping very good track of this, but it seems like there arent many times when I really want/need a coke these days.  I’d say that I’ve probably had about 1 per month, though I did go through a period where I had 3 or so in a week.

So next time you’re thinking that you want to get healthy, dont feel like you need to go vegan, cut out coffee for ever, and never have another drop of bourbon (or whatever you like) just because it’s better for you.  You’re right – doing all those things is better for you, but the fallout when you fail is probably going to be far worse than identifying what you really, really like, and commit to only enjoying that.

One thing to be careful with is replacing your consumption with your favorite thing.  For instance if I drank 1 caffeinated drink a day before, and then made it my goal to cut consumption of caffeine, switching it to 1 coke per day isnt going to cut it.  You’re going to have to lower your intake, full stop, but that doesnt mean you’ve got to completely give up what you like forever.

Readers: Do you agree, or do you think it’s easiest to just cut something out and be completely done with it?  If you’ve tried both ways, which do you prefer?

Since January, H has been eating what I believe is referred to as “pescatarian”, which is a diet of only fish and vegetables.  I on the other hand, am still eating basically whatever I please in terms of food – pork, chicken, and just about everything in between.  When she first suggested this, I had quite a few thoughts – I thought cooking 2 different meals at dinner time would be a pain in the ass, I thought that it would end up being more expensive because we’d be buying different types of food each week.  I didnt really mention this, as I’m not in the business of telling her what to eat, so with that, we became 2 people who had different (though sometimes converging) diets.

One thing that this has helped me with is one of my health goals for 2011, which was to eat vegetarian one or two days per week.  Having her already eating only veggies makes it easy for me to find some recipes that I’d like have we both eat the same thing a few times per week.  One place that I’ve been taking recipes from basically all summer has been the dinner with my family series at the simple dollar.  The recipes are all vegetarian and made with cost in mind.  Also, just about everything we have tried has been really good.

As far as cost is concerned, our food cost has gone up in real dollars, by around 50 per month – though honestly I think that could be lowered if we started eating more in season and doing a better job using all of the things that we already have on hand.  Her going vegetarian has allowed me to be choosier in what I eat, and in turn this has resulted in me focusing more on getting my own food through hunting and fishing in alaska.  While I try to get as much of my food as possible, I’m not just in it for the food – I’m in it for the fun as well.  I had a great time fishing and always have fun hunting, so I dont just look at these as food costs – they are somewhere in where food and entertainment intersect.

H says that she enjoys not eating meat (she didnt eat much before hand anyhow) and feels better, and while I cant say that I feel better 100% of the time, I can surely feel it if I’ve been eating terrible food for too many meals in a row – I honestly feel like I’m dragging a car behind me.  Though I use this as a good metric, it is by no means foolproof.

As far as the difficulty level, it really has not been that hard.  Sometimes we eat different things, but usually we eat the same thing.  I don’t mind eating more veggies, but every now and again I feel like having something with meat in it.

Readers: Are you vegetarians?  Is anyone in your house one?  Do you have any great recipes or know a good recipe source?  Have you tried a vegetarian diet at all?

I’ve been trying to keep everyone up with our CSA since I first wrote about it for the the Green Your Summer series, but I’ve decided to give some updates on the service every once in a while with my thoughts, etc.  This is the fourth update, and if you’re interested, the first update is here, and the second is here, the third is here and the fourth is here.

As I expected at the beginning of the summer, the end of this would be mostly apples, and that’s all it has been.  I dont really mind because I enjoy apples and apple cider.  Unfortunately I havent been in the mood to make much more applesauce, so we are now sitting on quite a bit of apples with not to much to do with them and a holiday trip on the horizon.  I’m going to bring some apples to my aunt and hopefully they will get eaten around thanksgiving.

This was H and my first year for doing a CSA, and I’ll admit I was a bit skeptical about getting what I paid for.  Would I just be paying a premium on food to support local farmers (not that I’m against that per-say, but most of this money doesnt stay in my state).  Or would I be getting a bounty for a relatively cheap price?  Would it be a pain in the ass, or would I enjoy it?  I’m happy to say that I think this was worth the money.  They didnt always give me what I wanted or hoped for in terms of fruit, but that’s the way life is on a farm.  So, there wasn’t really much room for griping on that front.  It has also been an enjoyable friday at lunch ritual where I load the dog up into the truck and we take a ride over to the farm store to pick up our fruit for the week.  It’s also handy having it come in a day before we go to the grocery store, but we weren’t very diligent on incorporating that into our menus for the week.

All of that being said, after talking about it with H for a bit, I think we will take advantage of the 10% discount they are offering to sign up for next year, and we may even expand our offering to get  veggies as well.  Since we eat veggies for most meals every week, I think this makes a lot of sense – and 10% off is nothing to scoff at.

Readers: Do you plan on looking into a CSA for next year?

Every month, I review my debt and the progress (or not) that I’ve made in paying it down.  I havent gotten much paid down so far this year because I’ve been doing quite a bit of traveling, but that has officially ended (finally)!  One of my goals for last month was to finally wipe this stupid direct loan off of the list after sending them a large payment last month.  Well, as of this writing I’m still waiting for them to find a check they misplaced so I can go in online and pay the remainder.

Student Loans

I made more progress on these!  My smaller loan is waiting to be paid off.  Why do these people make it so tough to give them money.

Direct Loan $0  ($563) – I have enough to pay this off but I haven’t done it yet, so I’m just going to mark it paid. Wa-HOOOOO!  They have lost the check that was sent (though they did cash it) so I’m waiting for that to post until I can pay them.  They should be finding it soon, or so they say. (UPDATE: They still haven’t found my check.  This obviously doesn’t make me happy)

Great Lakes Loan $11,448 ($96)  I hate this loan.  It never goes down.

Truck Loan

Pretty self explanatory - the loan for my truck.  I got a huge boost on this loan this summer from a hail storm we had in the area around mid july.  There was quite a bit of damage (many are getting new roofs) and there was over $6k of damage worth to my car.  When I got the check, the insurance rep said I could get the vehicle fixed or use the money to pay down the loan.  No brainer for me, and I wiped out 33% of the value of the loan.

Ford Credit: $9,765 ($300):  I cant believe that less than 2 years after taking a 20,000+ note that it’s under ten grand.  Though much of this was because of a hail storm that I couldnt have predicted and a low interest rate.  Some of it is because I was paying more than the minimum at the beginning of the loan – when it matters most.

Health Goals

I’ve also decided to track my health goals for the year.  This has been up and down all year, but despite the traveling, I’ve managed to keep it together this month.  This is usually gym visits, but I dont always like to go to the gym, so I’m changing it to workouts.  Usually when I dont go to the gym, I go running.

Goal Workouts: 20

Total Visits: 2

As you can see, this was a total and complete failure.  I was ok the first week, then the wheels just completely came off.  It snowed last week, so this is going to be mostly inside from here on out.  Hopefully I’ll be OK getting back on the wagon next month.

I havent mentioned much about our CSA since the Green Your Summer series, but I’ve decided to give some updates on the service every once in a while with my thoughts, etc.  This is the third update, and if you’re interested, the first update is here, and the second is here.

The first one I was pretty unhappy with the progress, the second one was basically all peaches, and this last month has been a little better variety.  We’ve gotten pears, watermelons, apples, peaches, a few plums and nectarines.  It has been quite the haul.

Each of the last 4 weeks, we’ve been given 10+ pounds of fruit.  We try to eat it all, but that doesnt always happen.  I did have to toss out 2 or so peaches that went bad on me, but I’ve been able to preserve the rest.  The time we got 12 pounds of pears I spent one week night canning about half of them and ended up with 2 quarts of pears in sauce, and I got a pint of a low sugar recipe of pears in apple juice with a cinnamon stick for what was left over and wouldn’t fit in a quart.

Last weeks share was quite awesome - nectarines and about 6 lbs of apples.  Unfortunately, all I got to do with it was pick it up, then toss my stuff into the car for fincon11.  I think there has been about 4 apples eaten all week, so I’m going to try my hand at some applesauce this weekend.  I dont know yet how much I’m going to get, but hopefully 2 pints.  I got another 5 lbs of apples and 7 lbs of pears today, so I may be back slaving over the canning stove next weekend as well.

This is everything that has been preserved from the CSA.  2 Quarts of pears, 1 pint of pears in cinnamon sauce, and 3 jars of applesauce.  I’m expecting to be getting nothing but apples from here on out, so there will probably be a lot more applesauce.

I plan on trying to add to this stash of preserving this weekend by trying my hand at some pick your own farms in my area.  I’m hoping to come back with tomatoes and possibly something else rather high dollar.  The farm told me that I could have anything I wanted for $1/lb, so I’d like to get quite a bit that way.  The tomatoes will get turned into sauce for pizza night, which is every Tuesday!

Even though at this point I’ve got 0 numbers to back up my claim, I’d say that H and I are pretty close to break even on this CSA for the year – and we’ve still got 2 months to go.  I’m pretty satisfied for the year, and would consider signing up for the veggie share for next year (in addition to this) if a garden doesn’t get started at the house (which it very well may not).

About 2 years ago when I started to clean up my finances, I moved into a new city and moved in with H.  After thinking about it for a while and talking with H, we both decided that we wanted to use as few harsh chemicals in the house as possible.  This meant changing cleaners, soaps and the whole nine yards.  For the first year and a half or so, we simply bought all the “green” labeled cleaners from whatever store we happened to be at if we needed something.  Given my extensive (enough) knowledge of the environment (it was a major in undergrad) I was pretty sure that even though we were buying all of these things, they probably were no better – they were simply labeled “green” and the price was much higher than normal.  Don’t get me wrong, Im sure they did some to alleviate the things that we were looking to remove, but they didnt do it all.

For a while, this was good enough for me.  I didnt worry about it, as I was driving a lot, working a lot and when I got around to cleaning, it was one of those things I didnt want to jack with.  Whatever cleaning solution I had in my hand to clean whatever I was cleaning needed to work – no other criteria necessary.  If it didnt work, I’d simply get pissed about it then go out and (most likely) buy the harshest stuff that I could find, just to ensure effectiveness.

After I got some more time on my hands switching jobs,  I started to chafe when buying that “green” cleaner – that crap was expensive.  Not only that, we were going through it fast enough to make me wonder if some addict was sneaking in at night and drinking the stuff.  After that, I finally decided that I’d try my hand at making my own, and searched the internet for the recipe for the homemade cleaner.  I wrote it up for a fellow blogger of mine Matt Jabs over at DIY Natural (Side note: matt was probably the first non-family comment on this blog, way back in like 09!).  Before I posted over on Matt’s site, I didnt read it that often (in my defense, it was inactive for a very long time), but matt started ramping up the content over there and I ended up subscribing right away.  I cant tell you how great the site is to read and how good his recipes work.

As he kept posting, I kept trying the recipes that he put up.  After my first foray into liquid laundry soap failed (still dont know why), I was in search for a new recipe and decided to give matt’s a try.  I had to work to find fels naptha but I had everything else on hand.  Im about 1/3rd of the way through the carton that I put my soap in, and I haven’t found any problems.  With that success, I decided to try more of his recipes!  I’ve made the mouthwash from diynatural, as well as the homemade deodorant (my first use was monday, I had to use up what I had first).  All have been working great so far.

Needless to say, I was pretty excited when Matt told me that him and betsy (his wife) were working on a guide for household cleaners.  I’ve had such great luck with all of the natural recipes shared on his website, that I was itching to try and do more. For only $37 dollars, you can get recipes for more than 60 cleaners for your every room in your house, that are all homemade and chemical free — So far in my experience, they work just as good (if not better) than the stuff you can buy at the store.  I estimate that by cutting out store bought cleaners and using homemade and natural ones, I’ve saved approximately $50+ in the last 6 months.

Note to readers:  I’ve been approached to be an affiliate for quite a few ebooks/guides/web products, but after looking them over, I elected not to be a part of the program.  Most of the things were either something that wouldn’t provide value equal to what I paid, or something that I was highly unlikely to use – so why should I encourage others to use it?  This is different – I’ll happily buy this, and hopefully start slowly replacing store bought things with homemade things as they run out.