How to Succeed With Your New Year’s Resolution for Weight Loss

You did it – like hundreds of thousands of people around the world – you’ve created your New Year’s Resolution for Weight Loss. You suddenly feel your stomach doing flip-flops – how are you ever going to achieve the weight loss. Why did you even think to make your New Year’s Resolution for Weight Loss – what were you thinking? Relax! You’ve got this – you can do it. It’s time to think yourself to success using these 8 great tips.

#1 Make Friends With the Favorite Foods in Your Life

Resolution: It’s over – they’ll be no more chocolate in my world – ever again!

We all have them – chocolate, jelly beans, cake, French fries, soda and the list goes on. Remove chocolate and add your own trigger food. However, banning your favorite food, no matter what it is, almost always backfires. You are far more likely to eat it or worse binge on it if you banish it from your life. Then you’ll feel bad and throughout your diet and go back to what you were doing before.

Succeeding With Your Resolution: Make your favorite food your friend – it really is time to kiss and makeup. Don’t have them in your home but let yourself have your favorite food a couple of times a week in moderation.

#2 Rejoice in the Health Benefits and Your Longevity

Resolution: All that food over the holidays landed square on my hips and my butt. I’m going to starve myself back to the size I was before holidays.

The minute the word diet comes out of someone’s mouth, we instantly have that feeling of being deprived of something. If the weight loss plan you come up with really feels like a drag, then you will feel like you are being punished and you’ll just throw away the entire idea.

Succeeding With Your Resolution: Instead, it’s time to rejoice about the health benefits you’ll enjoy and how that’s going to increase your longevity. So once you aren’t feeling down about losing the weight, and you don’t feel like you are being punished, instead rejoicing over how it’s going to help you live longer, you’ll feel energized and excited about your weight loss.

#3 Create a Goal

Resolution: Somehow I’m going to lose weight

This happens often. A person sets a goal for weight loss but they have no plan on how they are going to achieve that goal. Without having a road map to where you are going, you are much more likely to revert back to your past eating and exercise ways.

Succeeding With Your Resolution: Set your goal – it needs to be specific (I will lose 5 pounds in one month), it needs to be measurable (weigh yourself today – weigh yourself in one month), it needs to be realistic (saying you will lose 20 pounds in one week is not realistic) and it needs to be trackable (each week you can record your loss). Focusing on the changing and incorporating these four things will help you to be successful at achieving your goal and it won’t even seem like work!

#4 It’s a Good Time to Workout at Home

Resolution: I’m buying a lifetime membership at the gym

Finding a gym you really like is a nice place to start. However, signing up is the easy part. The weight won’t come off unless you have a plan to make sure you get to the gym and that’s where it often falls apart. Most of us are good for a month or so but then life starts to get in the way and we don’t get there one day, then two days and on it goes. Pretty soon, it’s easy to come up with an excuse not to go and before long; you are back to your old habits of not exercising.

Succeeding With Your Resolution: Forget the membership at the gym and start to work out from home. Decide what kind of workout you plan to do and get the equipment you need. Don’t go crazy – you can walk or run with no cost. You can buy a treadmill or exercise bike for a reasonable amount of money. You can buy free weights for cheap. By setting up your workouts at home, it’s convenient and you can do it on the fly.

#5 Making Basic Changes

Resolution: By March, I’m going to lose 40 pounds.

There are simply not very realistic goals. That’s 3 months and even personal trainers will discourage this type of action, because you’re much more likely to get frustrated and just give up.

Succeeding With Your Resolution: Instead make some basic lifestyle changes. You don’t have to do it all at once. Make small changes to what you are eating, your daily exercise routines, and other small changes that can help you to lose weight slowly and in a healthy manner where you can achieve the goals you make.

Making a New Year’s resolution is easy, but keeping it is the tough part. By making these changes, you are much more likely to succeed.