hungry poodle

If you’re a hopeful dieter/couch potato/smoker who has made a New Year’s resolution to get fit in 2012, the odds, they say, are stacked against you. According to Tara Parker-Pope, the Wellness columnist for the New York Times, a third of us will abandon our resolutions before the end of January, and four out of five of us will dump them sometime later in the year.

Does this mean it’s useless to even try to adopt healthier habits? Hold onto your gym shorts and your low-fat granola bars, there is hope, and it comes from an unlikely source: heroin-addicted U.S. servicemen serving in Vietnam in the late 1960′s and early ’70′s.

A recent npr.org story told the story of how a disturbing 15 percent of all servicemen in Vietnam became actively addicted to heroin during their service overseas.

A system was put in place where addicted soldiers were not allowed to return home until they dried out.  Followup studies found that these soldiers had a 95 percent chance of staying clean after they returned to the U.S. This flew in the face of other studies that showed that soldiers who were treated for their addiction after they returned to the the U.S. had a far worse time staying clean: 90 percent of them relapsed.

Why the huge difference? The answer turned out to be relatively simple: however much we may want to change, if we repeat a behavior over and over in the same setting we actually cause our physical environments to shape our behavior.  Intentions are not enough to carry us through.

Psychologist David Neal puts it this way: “People, when they perform a behavior a lot–especially in the same environment, same sort of physical setting–outsource the control of the behavior to the environment.”

Wow: another outsourcing of American energy. What next?

So, the soldiers who were treated for their addiction in faraway Vietnam came home to a completely different environment that supported their sobriety, whereas the soldiers who were treated in the U.S. were already in a comfortable, well-established environment that made it much more difficult to quit.

Neal says that over time our environments unconsciously direct our behavior, so the key to establishing better habits lies in somehow changing our environments to better support a healthy lifestyle.

I’m afraid this means moving the candy dish away from the TV table and putting your walking shoes right next to the front door instead of hidden in the closet. It’s not glamorous, it’s not easy, but if you thought it would be then you must be smoking something other than tobacco.

As the new year approaches, I think a toast is in order. 2011 will go down in my books as the year that our daughter Elizabeth married her love, Brendan. Late in September, after considerable efforts to rehab the old homestead, we threw an outdoor party in their honor that was a resounding success. The theme was loosely based on Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” because the book’s protagonist, Elizabeth Bennett, had the same name as our girl (an inadvertent coincidence).

Backstory: in the last 30 years we’ve bought, renovated and lived in four old houses, yet we’ve never actually completed any one of them. This time, for the first time, we went the distance. Tom the carpenter, Randy and Nick the sheet rockers, Scott the painter, Tommy the plumber and Carla the artist, all joined forces to replace, repair, paint and generally put a major facelift on 6111 Mission Drive. It was a herculean effort that took months. At one point I swore that I would never eat take-out pizza again.

Alas, 2011 was also the year of the Bennett flood. Just before Christmas, Tom, who was babysitting the poodles for one night, initiated a plumbing catastrophe that destroyed most of the downstairs, including 65-year-old oak floors that had to be ripped out. We spent Christmas on sub-floors with bare wooden rafters above.

But let’s not dwell on the soggy details. The house will be repaired–again. For several months we will live in the cabana (the little house out back that used to be my mother’s bachelorette pad) and I will focus on slow cooker recipes for hungry poodle, since the cabana has only a microwave and two burners.

This is a good thing if you like soup.

I recently decided to resign from Weight Watchers after ten years, effective December 31, so 2012 is suddenly appearing to me to be somewhat uncharted.

But isn’t that the way life pretty much is? Despite our best efforts to replace uncertainty with well-thought-out plans, it just never works out that way. I’m kind of OK with that.

A wise friend once gave me some sage advice. I had been whining about not knowing what to do with my life and she said, “You can look at this two ways: you  can continue to be afraid of the future or you can wake up each morning and say to yourself, ‘How exciting! I don’t know what will happen today, but I can’t wait to find out!”

I can’t wait to find out what will happen in 2012.

Happy New Year!

For those of you who need a jump-start into the spirit of the holidays, here’s a bit of cheer from the University of Minnesota School of Music. Apparently they invaded the School of Management (most likely a bah-humbug crowd) and, well, see for yourself!

Today is my 61st birthday and I have reached a tipping point. As Howard Beale proclaimed in the film “Network,” I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.

In the last decade these fits have consumed me on a yearly basis when my birthday, Christmas and the New Year converge to form a perfect storm of self-reflection. (Don’t you hate it when that happens?)

Here’s my plan: I am retiring from Weight Watchers. Working with people over the last ten years has made me a better, happier person. Working for a big corporation has been less gratifying. I am sad, but relieved, to have finally reached my tipping point and quit.

The living room oak floor, piled into the corner

Our house has presented another tipping point. Our longtime friend, Tom the carpenter, inadvertently caused a flood last weekend that has destroyed much of the downstairs. Ceilings have been torn out, 65-year-old oak floors pulled up, our sofa drenched and carted off to be reupholstered.

Miraculously, my 6’8″ grand piano, which I bought as a young adult 35 years ago, was spared any damage. It is now being stored for the next few months at the piano mover’s.

This means we will be humming Christmas carols a cappella and sitting on sub-flooring around the fireplace, each of which is a minor inconvenience compared to the human toll this disaster has caused.

Tom has been living with us for the last four months; he will have to leave this week so that we can move into his quarters during the restoration. His laptop computer was destroyed in the deluge and he has no definite plans about where to go in the long run, but the last of my tipping points is that, although I have tried, I cannot save him from his own life.

Perhaps one morning he too will awaken and be as mad as hell.