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How to Stick with Your New Year's Fitness Resolution

Come January 1st, hundreds of millions of people all over the world will make New Year's resolutions. Unfortunately, studies show that most people break these resolutions after a few months. If your goals for the New Year are to improve upon your fitness and diet, it is essential to see your goals through. The following tips will help you stick to your goals.

Make Realistic Goals

Making unattainable goals will frustrate and force you to break your resolutions before you have any chance of achieving them. If you have a favourite meal, don’t make a goal never to eat it again because it will be difficult to stick to such a resolution. And if you are trying to lose weight, telling yourself you can lose 20 pounds in a month is a tall dream that will be difficult to achieve.

Rather than make outlandish goals, go for small goals that you can attain easily without working yourself to exhaustion or starving to death. Slow, steady and measurable progress is the way to go.

Have a Solid Plan to Achieve Your Goals

It is easy to make lofty pronouncements at the turn of the New Year, but you may not achieve any results without an actionable plan to go with your resolutions. Before creating new fitness and diet goals for the New Year, you need to do some research on the best way to attain each goal.

Outline each step and write down everything on a piece of paper which you can paste somewhere you can always see. Include strategies for overcoming temptations, motivating yourself when you feel like quitting, and how to cope with setbacks.

What exercises do you love doing? If you are a beginner, start small with low-intensity activities like walking and cycling before advancing to higher intensity workouts. As for food, don’t cut out all the unhealthy foods at once to avoid uncontrollable cravings which can wreak your progress. Start by substituting one item in your diet for a healthy alternative and increase the pace as you go.

Get a Buddy

Your chances of sticking to your new year goals will receive a massive boost if you have a friend pursuing the same goals. Working out together, counting calories, exchanging recipes and tracking each other's progress can make the journey more comfortable, faster and more thrilling.

The both of you can inspire each other, challenge yourself to go the extra mile and also help yourself soldier on when you feel like quitting. 

Tell Your Social Network about It

A great way to stick to your goals is to let everybody around you know about it. Telling your family and friends, as well as colleagues in the office about your progress will motivate you to do more as they cheer you on to making your goals reality. The people around you can also offer support by helping you stay focused and making your environment conducive to achieve your goals.

Measure Your Progress

Whatever you do on the road to an ideal fitness and nutrition, track it. Regardless of how small or intangible a goal, measuring it allows you to know what is working and where you need improvements. Whether it is eating five servings of veggies each day, running 20km per week, increasing your deadlift by 2kg per week, or burning 20k calories each day; be sure to monitor your progress every day.

Be Patient with Yourself

Let's be honest. There will be many slips and drawbacks along the way. But don’t beat yourself too much over temporary setbacks. Whatever happens, give yourself time. Even if you set deadlines for achieving your goals, you can always set another deadline until you reach your destination.

Meanwhile, allow yourself some freedom and be patient with yourself. You have to stay focused, disciplined and continue to try even if you fail. Eventually, the right results will come.

 

 

 

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