Weight-Loss is a Goal, Not a Resolution!
Weight-loss is a huge topic on January 1st. Many people make resolutions for the new year to lose weight or get more exercise, only to give up due to one circumstance or another before the month is even over. In fact, a new statistic shows the average lifespan of a New Year’s Resolution is 18.3 days to 43.5 days.

Some New Year’s resolutions are broken within 24 hours of being set – short-lived! 

But for me, losing weight had nothing to do with the New Year’s Resolution. Rather, it’s a new (long-term) life-style change that just so happened to coincide with the beginning of this year.  I made a commitment that in 2012, I would not gain weight and start working on “effective” weight loss techniques.

This includes my daily diet; changing it to be more nutritional and beneficial by adding more raw foods. I also added a dietary supplement to help with my digestion and assist in my weight loss and management (Slender GR). I’m also getting up and moving more and exercising.

These were the plans I wrote down on January 1, 2012 – NOT resolutions, but goals. I did not want to put too much pressure on myself.  A goal will work just as well. So, let me share with you what these past 90 days of mindfulness dieting has taught me.

I grew up reading Gary Larson‘s cartoon book over and over again until it fell apart.  It’s not hard to see his influence in my drawings of cartoons. In fact, many of the single cell cartoons you find online are influenced by his humor and twisted look on life.

He was the first mental health humorist! For example, in one of his cartoons the caption went, “The Bluebird of Happiness long absent from his life, Ned is visited by The Chicken of Depression.“  This cartoon in Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” was published in 1988.

If you don’t know this famous comic strip/cartoon syndicated Universal Press Syndicate, you must live in a cave! I guarantee that you’ve seen one of his thousands of cartoons online. Here is the sad part, almost all the cartoons you see online of Gary Larson’s work…are stolen and fall into copyright infringement!

Gary Larson has not published any cartoons, to my knowledge, in a long time. He retired from daily panels of “The Far Side” on January 1, 1995. He did do animated films: “Gary Larson’s Tales From The Far Side” I and II, then dropped out of site. 

I made some “noise” (using social media to fight stigma) early in February with a post entitled, “Kmart Stigmatizes Children With Mental Illness – Selling Offensive T-shirts.” It took off through social media when a few big twitter peeps picked up the ball.

The retweets spiked with the image I took of the t-shirts. Thanks to the Founder and President and Host of The Coffee Klatch* who brought the problem right to the source…@Kmart!!

You can read about Kmart’s response and see some photos of the t-shirts below. While I don’t want to beat a dead horse; Kmart did remove the sale of the shirts from their website!

I also wanted to share an article from the Northern Illinois University Campus Northern Star newspaper