Make this Year Your Healthiest Ever

Living a healthy lifestyle is one of the number one resolutions made each year. But each year, about 90 percent of resolution-makers fall off the wagon within just a month or two.

Although thousands of people start out with healthy intentions, often there is a lack of follow-through that can have negative consequences year after year.

What Prevents Lifestyle Changes

Research shows that when it comes to resolutions, small resolutions are typically better than sweeping, generalized resolutions. The best way to keep resolutions is to break them into actionable steps that transform your life and lead to permanent lifestyle changes.

Use these simple tips to ensure your new healthy resolutions last a lifetime:

Make Smaller Goals

Large, sweeping goals are difficult to manage and maintain. If you state a vague goal, such as "I want to eat healthier this year" there are no actionable steps involved and it is easy to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the goal.

Instead of unclear goals, try exchanging them with smaller, specific goals, such as "I want to lose 15 pounds by this time next year." This specific, actionable goal gives you something specific to work towards, which will make it easier to reach your goals in the long term.

Create Short, Medium, and Long-Term Goals

If you have a long-term goal of losing 30 pounds this year, the next step is to create medium and short-term goals that help you reach this larger goal. For example, you could create a goal that would state that you need to lose half to one pound a week to reach this goal.

From there, you could calculate how much of a calorie reduction or exercise allotment you need to have weekly and daily to reach that half to one-pound weight reduction each day. Each pound of fat is estimated to have between 2500 and 4000 calories, so restricting your weekly food intake by 4000 calories should produce the desired results of one pound weight loss per week.

This means that each day, you would either have to exercise enough to burn the excess calories or restrict your food intake by 600 calories per day. One easily implemented strategy is to reduce daily food intake by 300-500 calories and exercise enough to burn 200-300 calories per day (it takes 15 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise to burn 100 calories).

Don't Try Fad Diets

According to research conducted by Stanford University, fad diets do not work well toward long-term weight loss solutions. If your goal is to be healthy or lose weight, a healthy diet is the basis of that new lifestyle. However, fad diets, such as diets that cut out all food of a certain color or require you to only eat three things, are no more effective at long-term weight loss than diets that are tamer. Extreme diets may seem like they are helping you live healthy faster, but in the end, they may be causing more problems than they are saving. Instead of fad diets, stick to sensible, healthy food choices.

Make it Easy to Reach Your Goals

We love to make excuses not to live healthy lives. We use the excuse of time, lack of healthy options or no access to exercise equipment to stick to our unhealthy ways. One of the biggest reasons why living a healthy life is difficult in the modern world is that our bodies love to eat fat and sugar.

Food manufacturers have realized this, and almost all pre-packaged foods are loaded with sugar and unhealthy fat. The best way to stick to a healthy lifestyle change is making it easy to reach your goals. If that is joining a gym close to your house, or creating your own in-home gym, then go ahead and do that.

If you need an exercise partner or someone else to go on a healthy diet change with you, make it happen. Set up a specific time each day to exercise and make it easy to eat healthy by preparing meals in advance and always having healthy ingredients on hand. Throw out junk foods and other things that cause you to make poor health choices. If it is easy to be healthy, you will find it easier to stick to your yearly goal.

Find What Motivates You to Change

Not everyone is motivated by the same thing. Perhaps you want to be strong enough to lift 200 pounds. Maybe you want to be able to beat your sister in a race. Maybe you want to run a half-marathon one day. Maybe you want to look toned and slim for swimsuit season.

Whatever it is, find what motivates you and think about that when you want to quit. If you have positive motivation, then you are far more likely to stick to your goal.

Remind Yourself of Your Goal Daily

Once you find your goal, stick reminders of it everywhere. Write your goal on sticky notes and stick them around the house. Set phone alarms to go off to remind you of your goal and how to get there. Have someone call you once a week and ask after your progress. These extra steps will help keep your eye on the prize and you will be less likely to fall off the wagon this time around.

Cook at Home

Takeout and fast food are the enemies of any healthy eating plan. The best way to ensure every meal you eat is healthy is to cook at home. Freezer meals made on the weekend are easy to pop into the oven after a long day of work. Leftovers are a healthy choice for work lunches. Cut up fruit and vegetables for snacking.

As much as possible, cook at home. This will not only help you stick to your healthy eating goals but it will also help your budget too.

Allow Backsliding

One day after work your buddies invite you out for pizza. You go and it tastes delicious. You feel bad the next day, and you decide if you've already broken your diet, what harm can a mid-day candy bar do? Before you know it, you are back to your old eating habits.

If this happens to you, don't stress. Just because you make a day or two of unhealthy choices doesn't mean your diet is ruined. Sometimes junk food is difficult to avoid. Don't think of your new healthy eating plan as something that has to be all off or all on. Yesterday you may have eaten pizza and ice cream, but today you can go back to eating fish and vegetables.

One unhealthy meal should not derail your entire healthy eating plan. Each day, you make choices to choose healthy foods. There is no such thing as an irreversible diet. Don't allow yourself to fall into the trap of believing that a few unhealthy choices (or even a few pounds returning) should prevent you from moving forward with your health goals tomorrow.

Find an Eating Plan that Works for You

According to research conducted by Stanford University, the type of eating plan you choose is far less important than diet plan sellers would have you believe. In a review of hundreds of diet studies on some of the most popular diet plans, like Atkins, Low-fat, and vegetarian, the researchers found very little long-term differences between the diets.

In general, diets that restricted carbs (like the Paleo diet) were more likely to result in faster weight loss, but over time, all diets had the same level of effectiveness if the dieter stuck with the eating plan.

What does this mean for you? It means that if you don't like tomatoes, you don't have to try some fad tomato-based diet to be healthy. Choose an eating plan you know you can stick to and you will have better long-term results. If you know you absolutely can't give up meat but have no problems dropping bread, then a low-carb diet might be for you. If you love your bread but don't mind giving up starches or vegetable oils, then choose an eating plan that goes along with that preference.

The most important thing is that you pick something you enjoy.

Aim to Maintain

According to a study conducted by Stanford University, if dieters chose an eating plan that was designed to maintain weight rather than lose weight, they were actually more likely to lose weight over the long-term than individuals who actively tried to lose weight. What does this mean for you? This data shows that long-term healthy lifestyle choices are all in the mind.

If you believe your eating plan is there to maintain weight, you will make healthy choices that don't feel like a sacrifice. But if you are in "diet" mode, you feel deprived, which makes binge eating more likely. View your new health resolutions as maintenance or a slow, long-term health journey and you are more likely to have long-term success.

Allow Cheat Days, But Not Too Many

Most diets have cheat days built into them. A cheat day is a sort of reward or goal to work toward for preventing diet burnout. According to animal studies, an animal who sticks to a healthy eating plan about 80 to 90 percent of the time has no negative effects from cheat days.

However, the key is to stick to the healthy eating plan at least 80 percent of the time. If you allow cheat days, make sure the boundaries are quite clear and that your cheat days do not become your regular days.

Here's to a Healthy New Year

Your health is important. Many of the big killer diseases in the world today are caused by preventable lifestyle choices. By making the choice to live a healthy lifestyle, you are protecting your health for the rest of your life. Healthy resolutions go beyond simple weight loss, although maintaining a healthy weight is also a key to long-term health. Consistent, healthy living over a period of several decades is the best way to drastically reduce your chances of dying from a preventable disease.