End of year regret or New beginning resolve?

We're all making NYE resolutions and hoping to keep our promises to ourselves.  Every news broadcast seen today or in the next few days/weeks offers weight loss tips or talks about the "battle of the bulge."  It's so predictable.  My new year's goals are not elaborate, but still elusive, and well-meaning all the same.

I always wish to be a nicer person and to lose some weight, not necessarily in that order.  It would be ideal to reach pre-baby weight (approaching six years on that one).  Or lose at least 10 pounds.  Or not gain any more weight.  You see how the thinking goes, or the obsessing goes.  Got to look better before it's too late.  Too late for what?

The first order of business should be to be a nicer person, patient mom, kinder friend, more tolerant partner, better world citizen. But looks seem so important, of course on the surface.  This year I wish to not obsess on looks so much, to quit fat-shaming myself and others in my mind.  We live in and become complacent with superficial judgment of how we and other people look, as if that's our sole worth.  We are obsessed with it, and I admit my own participation in the ugly process.

I hope to look back in a year and feel confident in having lightened up a little.  My thought patterns become locked in a preoccupation with eating and exercising/not exercising.  It is important to be healthy, but inner peace is certainly part of that health.  I want to be a calmer, more content person who seeks balance in life and appreciates what I have, not what I don't have.

Happy impending 2013!