Tips For Keeping Your New Year's Resolution!
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Every January, millions of Americans rediscover an eternal truth – making a New Year’s Resolution is easy but keeping a New Year’s Resolution is hard. No matter how good your intentions are, making a lifestyle change (and sticking with it!) is difficult.
With that in mind, we’ve put together a few tips that will help you to make and keep your Resolutions.
Be Specific: Some New Year’s Resolutions – like “Be Healthier” and “Eat Better” sound good but are so vague as to be pointless. There is very little way to judge how well you’re doing on a resolution like those.
So be specific with your Resolutions and make them actual goals you can use for a yardstick. Rather than ‘Be Healthier’ resolve to exercise for 45 minutes 4 days a week. Instead of resolving to ‘Eat Better’, make a resolution like eating vegetarian 2 days a week and eating only fruit between meals. If possible track your resolution using a metric – for instance track your fitness progress by tracking your BMI.
Be Realistic – It’s easy to get over-excited and make big plans, but by setting your goals too high you’re setting your self up for sure failure. If you’re a couch potato who resolves to exercise 1-1/2 hours every day you’re setting yourself up for disappointment. Make realistic goals that will push you nd make a positive impact in your life – but are also realistic and ‘do-able’.
Create a Plan – Be specific about how you’re going to achieve your resolutions. If you resolve to exercise 3 times a week of 30 minutes, commit to how you’ll do this. What time of day will you exercise? Will you be exercising at home or at a gym? Do you have any equipment you might need? Creating a plan helps you envision how you’ll keep your resolution which can make it seem more real.
Prepare for Setbacks – Realize that no matter how hard you try there will be times when you fail to live up to your resolution. One day you might just be too tired to exercise, or you blow your healthy eating resolution when you go out for dinner with friends. Don’t get too discouraged. Just chalk it up to experience and start back on your new path.
Don’t Keep It a Secret – Tell your family and friends about your resolutions and what your plan is to achieve them. This can provide the bit of ‘peer pressure’ that helps you keep your resolution. Even if they aren’t pestering you about it, just knowing you told them may give you the motivation to keep going.
Allow for ‘Cheat Days’ – A little ‘guilty pleasure’ is one of the things that makes life worth living. Give yourself permission to not be perfect every day. Allow yourself to take it easy on your exercise program occasionally or have dessert when you’re out with friends. Just make sure those instances are the exception and not the rule!
Give It Time – Don’t get discouraged if your new habits are difficult to maintain at first. It takes weeks for a new routine to feel like a habit, and month for it to really become a part of your personality. So just push through it for a bit and it will get easier soon.
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Additional Resources for Healthy Living
Unfortunately, there are a lot of web sites out there giving unreliable fitness advice. But there are also some great ones which we rely on when writing our articles. A few great resources for information you may want to also view include the National Institutes of Heath, the Mayo Clinic, and the World Health Organization.