By Every year when New Year’s Eve and the New Year roll around everyone starts talking about resolutions and how the New Year will bring a ‘New Them’. Which is great in theory – but when you start the New Year with these big plans or ‘resolutions’ but you are still the same you inside then you will likely fail.
For example, if your resolution is to lose weight but you don’t really change any of the bad habits that helped you gain the weight in the first place then you won’t be successful. If your mindset isn’t right then you will ultimately fail.
How often have you found yourself saying “I’ll start my diet tomorrow.” or “I’ll exercise tomorrow.” and then you make another excuse and another. I know that I myself have been very guilty of it. I often times feel like the amount of weight I have to lose makes me feel like it’s impossible so I give up before I even start. And unless I change that mindset for myself I will never lose the weight.
Changing your habits, replacing things instead of cutting things out and other various ‘tricks’ can help you on your journey.
Being able to replace the bad habits with good habits was something that was key for me in quitting smoking so I believe that this would be helpful in losing weight as well. Changing the habit of snacking on chips into a habit of snacking on carrots instead. Minimizing the amount of sugar I eat is more likely for me than cutting out sugar completely because then I don’t feel like I am depriving myself and end up binge eating an entire bag of mini Snickers.
Knowing my limitations and taking them into account are helpful for me when setting my New Year goals. I call them goals instead of resolutions because for me goals are more attainable. Goals no matter how big can be accomplished, even if it means that you need to break them down into smaller goals which seem more possible.
Resolutions always feel to me a bit like campaign promises. You know say you’re going to do something to change things but then you don’t really do anything to change at all.
When I decided to quit smoking I knew what my limitations were there too. I knew that just cutting back for me wouldn’t work. I knew that limiting myself to just a couple of cigarettes a day would never work for me even though it does work for some. I also knew that I didn’t want to be dependent on patches or gum.
So for me quitting cold turkey was going to be the only way for me. I also had a lot of help from my son who came home one day from school in tears because they had done a presentation about smoking. They showed him the lungs of a smoker and talked about people dying from smoking. So he comes home crying “Mommy, I don’t want you to die. Please stop smoking.
Hello Guilt!
But the guilt worked very well, I was able to quit cold turkey over 4 years ago. However, as often happens when you quit smoking I gained a lot of weight. So now the goal is to lose that weight.
I have decided to start a new workout program Cize along with my regular training sessions while my kids do Parkour. As well as changing my eating habits and limiting the junk food (which is by far the hardest thing for me).
I am also using an exercise tracker with the goal of working out 5 out of 7 days of the week. Also an app for tracking the food I eat so I can see where and when I go over too many calories. Establishing better habits and putting in checks and balances to try and keep myself in line when I want to stray from my path.
This weeks podcast goes more into how important it is to work on the internal as well as the external to make the goals that you set for yourself happen.
What do you think?