Top 10 New Year’s Resolution Tips
Don’t let anyone poopoo your New Year’s Resolutions, and also don’t let anyone sell you an easy way to earn something meaningful (like the hacks selling hacks). This is your life, your year, and you can make it your best year ever. It won’t be easy, but it’s not supposed to be, and you will gain more from leaning into the challenges and struggles than from the goals you attain.
- Get accountability: when it comes to high effort and high reward fitness the reality for most people is that “if it’s up to me it shall not be.” I’ve been a fitness professional for 27 years, and I’m still not an exception to this rule. I need someone(s) to show up and do my best for. For most people some sort of regular schedule with a coach keeps you vastly more consistent.
- Rethink your struggles and internal battles: we fight for and struggle for things that matter to us, so don’t listen to popular culture tell you that “if it’s right it’ll be easy,” which is really a subtle way of encouraging people to quit whenever something it hard. Struggling to do something is a sign that you care enough and are committed enough to do the hard things. Struggles don’t mean something is wrong, they just mean something is hard and that you care enough to lean in vs quit.
- Get off your phone: chatting with GPT, doom scrolling, etc are motionless activities that promote depression and consume the time that should be spent on sleep and exercise. In other words too much time on our (designed to be) addictive digital devices reduce physical activity, promote the feelings that drive binge eating, and keep you exhausted by keeping you up too late. Set some limits. All phones will tell you how many hours per day you spend on them, cut that back 30, 60 or 90 min. Don’t make excuses for your addiction.
- The 3 S’s: As Saint Bernard of Clairvaux warned us, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” You can interpret this in many ways, but here I want to talk about the 3 S’s – specific schedule for success. You can intend to lose weight, get in shape, etc., but banking on your intentions to lead to change is how you pave the road of frustration and demoralization. Our intentions need to be translated into specific tasks to be repeated, and unless your schedule is wide open those tasks needed to be schedule (and your schedule needs to be honored).
- Log your progress: if one of your New Year’s Resolutions is the most popular one – weight loss, you will be more successful if you track your weight. There’s a lot on the internet about how we should never step on the scale, and I’m sure that’s appropriate advice for some, however, what we know from 40+ years of research on sustained weight loss is that people who keep the weight off weigh and record themselves at least once a week. Recording it is more effective than attempting to remember trend lines. The same principle applies to other resolutions – want to run faster? Log your weekly miles. Want to be more fit – log how many workouts you get per week.
- Activity dates: try non-eating time with friends, family, significant others. You can try anything – axe throwing, walking somewhere, a pickleball lesson, etc. If you are going out to eat, see if you can walk to your destination. Retro style walking (walking without a phone) is one of the best ways to connect with and/or get to know someone, and it massively increases your daily step count and mood.
- Easy meal prep: everyone knows that prepping at least some of your meals in advance (especially in larger batches) makes eating better more likely, and anyone who has tried knows it’s a huge pain in the ass. You’re not going to be able to make it “easy,” but you can make it more manageable if you give up visions of Instagram worthy meals and remember that we don’t actually need much variety. Breakfast can a piece of the large egg white bake you made on Sunday + a piece of fruit; or oatmeal with a bit of protein added. Lunch can be turkey on low calorie bread with veggies and mustard, or fat-free cottage cheese with fruit. All of these things can be purchased near ready to go, saving you valuable time.
- Don’t drink your calories: liquid calories (soda, fancy coffee or tea, buttery coffee, etc.) provide zero satiety, and those extra calories add up quickly. They are also the easiest calories to subtract. The one exception here would be protein shakes (plain ones) because protein is uniquely filling, and they only taste OK. Just being OK means they don’t stimulate your food reward center like high fat and/or high sugar drinks would, so they won’t be over consumed, nor will they stimulate your drive to overeat elsewhere.
- Go to bed: the longer you’re awake the more you eat today, and the hungrier and less disciplined you will be tomorrow. For most people this goes back to setting some limits with your phone, scheduling “do not disturb” time periods on your phone, reading or watching something boring at bed time. As a society we get too much recovery (physical inactivity) time, but we don’t often get enough sleep, and our devices are the biggest obstacle.
- Shake it up: use a protein shake with minimal extra calories in one of your meals per day. The meal could be just 1-2 apples and 1-2 scoops of protein powder with water… protein makes us feel full, our bodies seem to seek a certain amount of protein before they are satiated. Most women are 20-25 grams short of what they need to be less sore, have more energy and be more full. 1 scoop of protein is usually 25 grams.
Happy New Year and good luck with your New Year’s Resolutions!