Is it already time to lose weight again?

The New Year is just around the corner. Before you know it (no matter HOW much you avoid the whole resolutions thing), you will be bombarded with talk of eating better, getting a gym membership and dropping some pounds. The TODAY show will be your worst enemy!

You've probably bought into it before. You decide - January 1st - that you will lose weight! Then, sometime around January 11th, you let out a big, "SCREW THIS!" and go right back to December 31st.

Commit to six weeks. That's it. Just six weeks. What do you need to do? Eat better? Move more? Personally, I really push people to work on the "eating" thing and then move on to the "moving" thing. Doing too much at once will just BURN YOU OUT! So, for the sake of this post, I'll be focusing on the "eating."

Start planning now, for your six weeks of BETTER!

Get a little notebook, or a scrap of paper, or the back of junk mail ... or a napkin. Just get something to write on! There are a gazillion ways to approach your BETTER. Perhaps you want to count points and do a bit of a Weight Watcher's approach. Maybe you'd rather just stick to something like the vegetarian food pyramid. Or it could be that you want to cut out all refined sugar to be BETTER. What's your thing? Write it down. Write it in big, bubble letters and color it with a highlighter. Decorate it with stickers, or old St. Jude return address labels - whatever you've got! Then tape it up somewhere that you'll see every day. It won't go with your decor, but neither does heart disease or splitting britches. It's beautiful. Hang that sucker UP!

THEN, start writing out what you're going to eat ... for six weeks. Does that sound crazy? Hmmmm ... how 'bout eating out most meals and sending yourself to an early grave with each blood vessel slowly suffocating from all of the cholesterol? Now THAT sounds crazy.

DO IT! What will you be eating? Maybe you want to plan just one or two weeks, then rinse and repeat throughout the six weeks of BETTER. Boring? Yeah ... not as boring as finding yourself morbidly obese and unable to get out of bed, and spending your days trying to talk to Dr. Phil via satellite phone.

So, enough with the whining! Take this menu list and stick it up next to the other, gorgeous, Better Homes & Gardens-esque BETTER note that you already plastered on the fridge ... or by the toilet ... wherever.

AND ... now you'll need to find something to do when you're not eating constantly. Maybe you need to start blogging, or knitting, or sending hand written letters to old college friends, or reading, or reading to your kids, or talking to yourself, or painting your toenails over and over and over and over again. This is it, friends! Looking for more time in the day? You've just found it. Take advantage.

Don't wait until December 31st. Plan now. Only focus on six weeks. Heck, if it goes well, and you feel better, then you can keep going. You can start putting together shopping lists. You can organize your Tupperware shelf, so that you can pack and prepare ahead of time. You an go ahead and write yourself little notes of encouragement to put in your lunch every day. If you start now, maybe you'll forget what you wrote by then and they'll be a surprise!

If you hit February 10th, and you've continued to read your little taped-up lists every day, and followed them - then come back and tell me. I'll throw you a cyber party.

(photo by Michelle Dennis of www.wanderingword.com)