If you don’t plan on making a new year’s resolution about weight loss, congratulations! They usually fail and lead to cycles of losing and gaining weight, preoccupation with food, and a negative body image. We can probably all use a resolution to be healthier though in the coming year. Here are a few things to consider.
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Focus on lifestyle changes that are more likely to last. Make it about wellness, rather than weight. This way, you’ll be healthier and might even lose weight as a byproduct of your efforts.
Look to make a daily behavior change, and set short-term goals. If you’re physically active a couple of times a week, it might be as easy as resolving to be active four times a week for a month. Then, re-evaluate. And when you set your goal to be active four days each week, determine what your reward will be. Perhaps you’ll wait to order that self-watering planter until after you’ve met your first goal. Let your goals be achievable and based on things you can actually do, rather than weight-loss results. It could be eating a healthy breakfast every morning, or eating fish twice a week and making sure you sit down when you eat.
You might resolve to eat a fruit or vegetable at every meal of the day. Eating more fruits and vegetables, along with drinking plenty of water and walking daily, has been shown to be a pretty powerful combo when it comes to weight-loss success. But that’s not your concern now. Before you get there, your goal is to create a healthy habit you can sustain. Same goes for exercise: Your goal is to create a habit that will improve the health of your body and mind.
And about that blustery, extremely cold weather that might squelch your activity goals and make them hard to achieve: if you dress in enough layers, no one will see your shabby long underwear!
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Be well!