Happy End of 2013+One More Goal

Today I was looking through my blog for recipes to use at a class I'm teaching next weekend. It's hard to believe that I have been blogging for almost a year, and I was really happy to see what a great collection of recipes I've compiled in that time. I  realized that I've never included a search feature on my blog, so I'm going to look into that and see if I can add one- that would make it a lot easier to look for specific recipes. Blogging about cooking is definitely the thing I've enjoyed most about my experiment here, and I plan to keep using my blog for that purpose even though my year of goal making has come to an end.
For my last goal of the year- #52, I'm going to try eliminating cow's milk, cow's milk yogurt (which I eat a lot of), and cow's milk ice cream from my diet for a month. I'm going to leave cheese made from cow's milk in there, as I don't eat a lot of it, and when I do, I really enjoy it.  As I've probably said to many of you in the past, unless a food allergy is life-threatening, I'm not likely to pay too much attention to it. In this case, I've had  digestive problems a few times that seem like they may coincide with eating cow's milk (and associated products), so I'm going to cut them out for a month and see if it makes a difference. It may be one of those things (like bell peppers) which have an annoying side-effect (skin flushing) that I have to accept if I choose to eat them (with peppers I do because they are so delicious!). At any rate, I've already tried giving up a couple of other things this year for a month, and honestly, it's not that hard.
 I've looked over the other goals I made this year, and I'm pretty pleased with how I've done. With the ongoing goals, I didn't do every goal every time, but I did these things A LOT more than I ever did before. I think writing them down was key- there were many days, for example, when I felt like having an unhealthy snack, but I ate an apple instead since I had committed to doing that every day. I also didn't have any artificial sweetener this year- that was huge, as I was previously chewing 3-4 sticks of sugarless gum a day! Other highlights include going snorkeling even though I was totally scared (this came out of goal#30, which was to try at least one new activity before the end of the year), visiting a dermatologist and finding out that a mole I was worried about wasn't cancerous, and reading way,way more books than I have in years. All of my goals were fun to come up with, and most of them helped health and wellness goals that have been rattling around in my head for years come to fruition.
Thanks to everyone who has read my blog in the past year! I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you keep visiting in 2014...if you'll keep reading, I'll keep writing!