Maintaining New Year's Plans

January 1st is started with best intentions to make significant changes and New Years Resolutions.

You might have said “Really, this year, this is the year I’m really going to do it”.

And by February, as many as 80 % of plans have fallen by the wayside.

We get busy and can go back to previous habits and routines.

What can you do to make this year different?  

Tiny Goals

Sometimes we think we need to do something monumental with our dietary intake to make a measurable health improvement.

 However maybe you only need to do something that may seem trivial, that doesn’t take too much energy, willpower, or sacrifice and do it consistently for the whole year.

-       Set Behavioural Goals

-       15 minute walking before starting work for the day

-       Ensuring you have a vegetable (yes just one – and no, not potato for every meal)

-       Preparing a meal plan for the day , or the week, and creating a shopping list

-       Taking lunch to work 4 days per week

-       Focus on positive behaviour – ie “I’m going to start to do [insert new habit]” rather than avoiding a negative behaviour ie “I’m going to stop doing [insert stopping old habit]”

-       Having long term outcome goals are great, but the daily behaviours are what is going to get you to reach those outcome goals

Avoid Extreme Rules and Dietary Restriction

-       Extreme restrictions and fad diets (dietary dogma) are difficult to follow from a psychological, social and physiological perspective

-       Examples are avoiding all carbs, keto, carnivore diet. They may work for some people, but for the majority of people the long term results (1-2 years plus) are not great.

-       If intermittent fasting works for you, that’s amazing, but if it means you eat a plate full of snacks later in the day, it’s really not going to work in the long term.

-       Restrictions may lead to feelings of failure, guilt, binges, disordered eating, weight cycling

Check Ins, Being Accountable

Rather than wait until January 1st next year to evaluate what’s worked, and what hasn’t this year, regular monitoring can keep you on track, and adjust plans as needed.

Some strategies our clients do are:

-       Hunger rating scale

-       Checklists to help – shopping lists, number of meals, food group intake

-       Food diary to relate glucose levels, patterns of intake, where meals are eaten

-       Clothes size, or weight changes

-       Timely dietitian reviews and coaching. Making ongoing lifestyle choices can be a bumpy ride, and you don’t have to do it alone

Flexibility with Plans

If 2020 taught us anything, plans can be difficult. Events will come up, situations will change (returning to the office), holiday plans may be altered. The same with our dietary intake, we may need to adapt to changing situations.

Consistency

It’s not what you do all the time, it’s what you do most of the time.

Rather than thinking about the perfect diet and the perfect exercise program, it’s somewhat refreshing for my clients to have a “reasonable diet and reasonable exercise approach”.

This means:

-       Following some guidelines for good nutritional intake that meets nutritional requirements, fuels exercise, prevents you from being hungry

-       Having meals rather than snacks

-       Having balanced meals which contain high fibre, some protein, an amount of carbohydrate that fuels exercise, and good fats. The right program can me maintained and doesn’t result in feeling deprived

-       Eating mindfully / consciously

Remember the best nutritional plan needs to be sustainable all year, not just the first month of the year.