Farewell, 2018

With just under two hours to go, 2018 is drawing to a close. I’m honestly a little shocked that New Year’s Eve is here already; this year flew by so fast!

This year was a year of milestones for us. Goals were achieved and dreams came true.  In so many aspects of my life, I am in a completely different place than I was a year ago, in all the best ways. Here are a few of the highlights:

Bill and I bought a house. To be more specific, we bought the home of our dreams – a beautiful condo in Edmonds. We love our home and our town, and are so excited to have found the place we intend to call home for the rest of our lives. We feel so lucky – it literally has everything that was on our wish list for a home.

I earned my Bachelor’s degree. This was a dream of mine for SO long! I am still in awe that I actually did it.  It was a ton of work, but I am so happy that I never gave up and that I saw it through. I didn’t just do the minimum, either – my final project earned a Capstone Excellence Award! My official graduation ceremony is in September 2019 and I am very much looking forward to celebrating this huge achievement.

I landed a dream job at work and I love it. Since leaving telecom almost four years ago, I had been trying out different roles and departments, but none of them really made me as happy as working in complaints at my last company did (I am aware of how strange that sounds, but I really did love that job!). Once I got tired of working in complaints, I worried that I would never find anything else that I would be that good at. Even though I had briefly considered pursuing a career change to Human Resources, my heart belongs in Regulatory. Ultimately I decided that was the place for me, and started looking in earnest for opportunities. The same week I finished school, I was offered a position with my company’s Regulatory team. I couldn’t be happier. Everything about this job feels right. 

Overall I look back on 2018 and feel that it was a pretty amazing year. Cheers to an equally amazing 2019!

 

Lists

Every December, I have to complete a self-assessment that will be part of my annual performance review and this year I meant to write “I consistently deliver results” but mistakenly typed “I consistently deliver resluts” and spellcheck didn’t catch it so it’s a good thing I proofread everything before I hit Submit because otherwise my boss may have thought I am involved in some sort of strange human trafficking effort instead of completing my tasks.

The end of the year is somehow full of lists to make. On my self-review I list out everything noteworthy that I did at work all year, summarizing twelve months of eight- to ten-hour days in a few paragraphs of highlights. Not mentioned are the day-to-day things that probably did make a difference but don’t warrant a shout-out from myself to myself, like making coffee in the break room when I go in there and the pot is sitting empty, or cleaning up that same break room because whoever took the last of the coffee and didn’t bother to brew a new pot also spilled some of that coffee on the counters and didn’t wipe up the mess, or not murdering the girl who sat a few desks away from me with my mind when she dissolved into yet another fit of tears because someone had the audacity to slight her by only thanking her once in writing but not verbally in a staff meeting for some task she half-completed and then abandoned to her colleagues when she lost interest.

Just as popular as the things-I-did lists are the lists of New Year’s Resolutions. I’ve written some of these lists myself over the years, but more often than not I choose to skip over the whole resolution thing. I am especially not a fan of weight-loss resolutions. It’s an epidemic: people feel especially bad after a gluttonous holiday season, and resolve to get back on track in January with healthy eating and fitness.

Here’s the thing: I like the idea of resolving to take better care of myself. What I hate with a passion are all the people and businesses out there preying on people who want to use the New Year as a starting point to make lifestyle changes. Already, my social media feeds are clogged with “New Year New Me” pledges and those damn MLM’ers (side note: I found out that they’re referred to as “Huns”, because the stupid messages they send usually start out with “Hi Hun!”) are out in droves, peddling their wares to anyone who professes a desire to drop weight in the new year. Guys, diets don’t work. They just don’t. Those pills and wraps and teas will not work. The only thing they’re guaranteed to reduce is your bank balance. Diets like Keto aren’t going to work unless you literally eat that way for the rest of your life, which most people cannot realistically do but even if you can realistically restrict carbs forever you’re probably going to damage your kidneys in the long-run. The best way to lose weight and keep it off is to only make changes you’re willing to make forever. End of story. If you really do need help figuring out what to eat, enlist the help of a registered dietician. Unlike the “health coaches” on social media, RDs have actual training in nutrition and can help you get on track to eating healthy in a sustainable way. And, for the record, every RD I know hates Keto too.

A lot of gyms are no better: this time of year, there are all these great introductory prices for new members who sign up for long-term contracts. In the past, when I’ve belonged to Gold’s Gym or 24 Hour Fitness, I could count on the gym being a ghost town in December and filled to the brim with new members come January 2. The issue I have with all this is that by March, only a fraction of these new members will still be going to the gym. I get it: working out at the gym is not for everyone. I myself only have a membership because I like to take dance classes. But people who sign up for these gym memberships at the beginning of the year are often stuck with them even after deciding that they aren’t a good fit, so they stop going but still pay the monthly fee because it’s expensive to buy out of the contracts they had to sign to get the lower prices. I highly recommend that anyone looking for a gym to join find a reputable one that has a month-to-month option, even if that place is more expensive. 

As an alternative to vowing to lose weight in 2019, could we maybe change our approaches and vow to take good care of ourselves instead? Yes, part of that is eating well and moving our bodies, but it also means doing things that make us feel good and banishing harmful things (like diets!) from our lives. It means making meaningful and longterm changes that help us to feel better.

Surely this is better than throwing money at the diet industry. And who knows – maybe at the end of 2019 we can add “did substantial financial harm to diet-product companies by not buying their crap products anymore” to our lists of accomplishments.

 

 

The Exorcism of MLMs

The following is a cautionary tale. It doesn’t matter whether I behaved stupidly and brought these events on myself, or if there was no way I could have known that my seemingly harmless actions would lead to this. Either way, I share this story to protect others from a fate similar to mine. 

This morning I saw a post on Facebook that was shared to a podcast group I’m in by one of the other members. I won’t re-share it here, as I don’t know the original creator, but it was a health and fitness-themed motivational quote and it resonated with me. Huh, yes, perhaps this little saying could be motivation for me when I’m telling myself I’m too tired or it’s too late or I have other things to do and I should NOT throw on a quick video and do a workout in my living room. Okay, yes, I decided, that could actually work to motivate me. Cool idea.

I hit ‘like’ on the post.

*quick pause for ominous “oh no don’t do that why did you do that you should have turned away but you just HAD to go forward and now you’ve kicked off a chain of events that you won’t be able to control” music*

The action of ‘liking’ the post was innocent enough. I’m pretty liberal with my liking of things on social media, especially when it comes to either cool old houses or cute puppies and kitties. Likewise, I enjoy posts that contain sarcasm, snarkiness, or absurdity. I’m not usually a big ‘motivational sayings’ girl, but every now and then something will genuinely land with me and I’ll hit ‘like’.

I wasn’t prepared for the consequences. 

Almost immediately, my morning social media scroll was interrupted by a notification that I had a new message waiting for me on Facebook Messenger. Assuming that the incoming message was from either my husband or one of my friends, I clicked over to check it. Instead, I found a waiting message from some girl I’ve never heard of, and all it said was “Thank you for liking my post.”

Huh? What post? I’d ‘liked’ quite a few things this morning, since as I already mentioned, I’m not stingy with the Facebook reactions. What the heck did she post that I reacted to, and what about it was so poignant that it warranted a follow-up thanking me for doing it? Since I wasn’t going to reply to her just to say “You’re welcome” or anything, I deleted her message and moved back to Facebook to continue my mindless scrolling.

She’d sent me a friend request!

The only thing I loathe more than being sent a friend request by someone I don’t like in real life who follows up to mention to me that they sent me said friend request, making it all awkward as I try to come up with some excuse for why I’ll never be approving that request while mentally kicking myself for not blocking this person before all this had to happen, is being sent a random friend request from someone I’ve never met. Who the hell IS this girl? I thought, as I went to stalk her profile.

A quick profile review told me everything I needed to know: she was in the same podcast group as I was, which helped me narrow down which post of hers I’d interacted with. She’s got “stay at home parent” as her job, “Mom and Certified Health Coach” in her bio, and all of her posts are public and are sharing before-and-after photos of girls that have lost weight using whatever MLM* crap she sells online, with some diet quotes mixed in with for flavor (no pun intended….okay, okay, yes, absolutely pun intended).  I couldn’t make out which company she’s peddling wares for, which is undoubtedly part of the idea: if you want to know, you have to reach out and ask her and then you get the sales pitch.

I do not want sales pitches before 8am. Or ever, really. 

Now I knew what this girl was all about. She would message those of us that were foolish enough to hit that dumb like button her post, add us as friends, and proceed to tell us how her products would help us lose weight forever and change our lives! Yay! She would use lots of smiley and heart emoji’s, call us “girlie” or “gal” or some other moniker that would make me want to strangle her with my shoelaces, and enthusiastically and with LOTS of exclamation points tell us all about her life-changing crap that would make us look like Barbie for the absolutely reasonable price of a million dollars a month. Or something like that – you get the idea.

This is not my first rodeo – I fell for these sorts of tactics back in the earlier days of Instagram, before I learned to pay close attention to profiles before I’d like a post or follow someone. These days, if someone manages to make it into my DM’s trying to sell me shit, I simply block them rather than deal with them. I haven’t really had this experience with strangers on Facebook though – usually the MLM’ers there are people I know who either auto-add me to their virtual parties or inundate my news feed with their products. I believe it is absolutely justified to unfriend those people, like exorcising my Facebook feed of MLM garbage.

I really can’t decide which I hate more – random strangers trying to sell me pseudoscience, or the pseudoscience itself. Full disclosure: I have very stupidly tried many different diets, some of them of the MLM variety, which all promise to make you lose weight faster than you ever could with diet and exercise, and the only thing I can promise you about all of this stuff is that it does not work. As I’ve said before on this blog, the only time I was able to reach and maintain a weight I was happy with was when I threw all diet mentality out the window and got myself into the habit of eating reasonably healthy and exercising regularly. Once I put myself on that first diet, it all went to hell and I’ve struggled ever since. Furthermore, people who parade around with titles like “Certified Health Coach” are not doctors or dieticians and they don’t actually have the qualifications to tell you what you should be putting in your body. Actual registered dieticians warn against all of these supposed miracle diets, because they’re not going to do anything but make desperate people shell out money they don’t have for products that don’t work. And I can absolutely promise you that none of that MLM stuff these “health coaches” are trying to sell you is going to lead to any long-term weight loss success, because if it did, everyone would be doing it! If some company out there had finally cracked the code and knew the magical answer to the question of how to lose weight, don’t you think that everybody and their mom would be all over it? 

The conclusion to this story is rather unremarkable – I deleted the friend request and unliked the post that started this whole mess so that hopefully that girl doesn’t find me again. If she does, I can definitely block her, but for now we’ll see if she takes the hint. 

I do still really like her original post though.

 *MLM stands for Multi-Level Marketing and it is a nicer way of saying “pyramid scheme”.