How to Keep Your New Year's Resolution to Lose Weight - Women Campus
New Year’s Eve is usually one of the highlights of winter break. Home for the holidays, it’s a night of guaranteed plans and a reason to buy a sparkly new outfit. When that ball drops you clink glasses with your friends, wish everyone around you a happy New Year, and maybe even plant one on the cute guy standing next to you. After all the hype settles down, the New Year also brings about the motivating “New Year’s Resolution”. You can’t help but set your sights high; break a lifelong bad habit, get straight A’s, make changes in your relationships, or the ever-popular promise to yourself to lose weight. The thousands of weight loss commercials that plague every channel on television immediately following New Year’s Eve can be helpful to start the year off on the right foot, but the motivation only lasts so long. It’s an all too familiar routine. During the first week of January you hit the gym every day, eat healthy and stay active. Week two rolls around and you’re finding better things to do, but still frequenting the gym while having the occasional discouraging pig out session on leftover holiday sweets. When that dreaded third week of January rolls in, you’re forgetting what your resolution was exactly. So how can you break this routine and stick to your resolution to whip your body into shape? Her Campus spoke with registered dieticians Dianna Branning and Tanya Horacek to come up with some easy pointers to stick with your New Year’s resolution to lose weight! Set realistic goals There is nothing more discouraging then seeing little to no results when you set a goal to lose weight. Losing weight in a healthy way takes time and persistence. Don’t tell yourself you’re going to lose five pounds a week or lose all the weight by the end of January. Focusing on how many pounds you’re losing is not the best way to go about getting fit. Set week-by-week realistic goals of what you are going to do instead of how much you are going to lose, such as going to the gym 3 or 4 times a week and only having one small dessert per day. The more realistic your goals are, the less likely you are to get discouraged. These goals, in turn, will lead to the weight loss you want to see. Aside from weight loss goals, it is important to set goals for an attitude change as well. Horacek says that rather than focusing on the number on the scale, make some changes to your lifestyle that will be noticeably different. Try adding a few of these new behaviors into your new year:
- Exercising 3 to 5 days a week
- Packing a lunch or making your own snacks rather than eating out
- Cooking dinner instead of eating out
- Buying fresh produce from a local farmer’s market
- Eating at least 1 to 2 servings of fruit and vegetables a day
- Taking time to nourish your mental health as well, such as through yoga, meditation or keeping a journal