Keep Your New Year's Resolution for a Healthy New Year!

Make a New Year's Resolution that won't make you nuts!
Happy New Year!

It's that time again,time to say good bye to the old, and ring in the new! And for many that means making the New Year's resolutions that all too often are not kept. It's not so much that resolutions are bad; it's that people tend to overdo them, just like people tend to overdo many other things, like eating.

Some of the most common resolutions are to lose weight, to start exercising, to live healthy lifestyles. These are very good resolutions, since most people really do need to make those changes.

Because people tend to dive in head first, they quickly become overwhelmed and frustrated and they aren't able to stick to their plans. The resolutions fall by the wayside. Here is a plan for a healthy New Year's Resolution to lose weight and live a healthy life that you can really stick to.

Make smaller, reasonable resolutions

Don't try to make a huge resolution that will trap you into either making extreme behavior changes or abandoning your New Year's Resolutions altogether.

Start small, and make resolutions you can really stick to. Instead of trying to lose 100 lbs, try making a resolution to lose 2 lbs each month. Better yet, simply plan to eat healthier in ways that will become a habit for you over the course of the year.

Resolving to lose 100 lbs this year locks you in and if you mess up your diet at some point, or have other problems in managing that weight loss, you will end up feeling hopeless and just wanting to give up. That's when you will be likely to not only not lose the 100 lbs, but to gain more. Saying you will lose 2 pounds each month is a reasonable, easy goal that you can manage, and may even beat. If you lose more than 2 lbs in a month you will be encouraged to push on even more. If you mess up your diet this week, you still stand a very good chance of correcting it enough to still lose the 2 lbs this month.

Better than any diet is learning to eat a healthy, well balanced, nutritious diet as a matter of habit. This is the best way to lose weight and keep the weight off, and the best way to make your healthy new year's resolutions.  Pick some things you can do to improve your diet and lifestyle and target those as your resolutions. Here are some examples:
Resolve to add at least 5 grams of fiber to your regular diet every 6 weeks, until you regularly get between 25 and 30 grams of fiber each day,
Resolve to cut out 1-3 sodas per week or per day (depending on how many you drink),
Resolve to walk around the shorter block once every other day (if you don't exercise at all now),
Resolve to add one new vegetable, trying it several times in different dishes, each month or every other month,
Resolve to drink at least 8 ounces of water before any other beverage is allowed with your main meal.


These are just a few suggestions. Sit down and list the things you want to change about your diet and lifestyle, and then make a separate list of easy steps you can take to change those things. Then you can craft your New Year's Resolutions accurately.

Don't over do it!

Even when you chop your resolutions to smaller, more manageable items, it's important not to overload yourself. No one needs 40 New Year's Resolutions. Every change doesn't have to start at the New Year, either. So if you find that manageable resolutions makes it so much easier to stick to your plans and you can call all your resolutions a success by April, just make some new ones at that point. But if you try to make every one you think you'd like to see happen, all at once in January, you will find yourself overwhelmed and not even able to keep track of them all.

There are plenty of other, worthy resolutions that don't have anything to do with losing weight, exercising, or healthy foods, but these seem to weigh heavy in most peoples minds, especially at this time of year, and so this is where this article focused.