Stick with your resolutions

A New Year’s resolution is one of those things that everyone has but few manage to complete. Setting one up is really easy and can be done on a whim, but it’s the follow up that poses the challenge.

Some last just over a week, or after a couple of months the idea of a new years resolution seems to get outdated.

So why does this seem to happen? Do people lack the will to change something they want and be consistent about it?

I can’t explain, nor justify the decisions made by others but what I offer instead are a few simple steps which hopefully would make 2013 a successful new beginning.

The first step in making a new year’s resolution is to make it specific, measurable and tangible.  If my goal was to get a six-pack (maybe by 2015), that would be a much better resolution than to “exercise more”.  Getting abs is something specific, measurable (it doesn’t all form at once) and once the goal is completed, it’s definitely something tangible.

Compared to “getting smarter, stronger, more good looking”, having a specific goal is a lot easier to see progress which then creates motivation hopefully having a positive feedback loop which would last until the goal is reached.

The second step is to understand yourself and just how much willpower you can commit to a with New Year’s resolution. This is most apparent when people attempt to change anything about their lifestyles.

A lifestyle change is something that’s very difficult because humans by nature tend to be resistant to change. Beyond the psychology, there will also be physiological barriers to overcome, especially with starting to work out.

Do you have a strong enough willpower to get past the huffing and puffing stage and actually make progress? That is probably going to be the most difficult part to push through, which causes many to give up early on.

The final step has to do with expectations. By setting up the right expectations early on, it could mean the difference between success and failure.

Losing fat is another common resolution and probably the reason why so many people hit the gym early in January. Some people decide to quit early when they feel that they’re not making any progress.

A pound of body fat is equal to approximately 3,500 calories.  What this means is that it will take a calorie deficit of 500 per day for an entire week in order to lose just one pound of fat.

The point is, expectations have a large part to do with just how long people are able to commit to a task and it’s important to have them set up correctly at the beginning.

Last year was quite eventful being the year of the dragon, the year when the Mayan calendar reset and also a leap year. Have fun and good luck setting resolutions for 2013.