Re: Solution

Here are five points to consider if you’re serious about making 2017 the year you regain control over your physical health and quality of life:

1. New Years is only an effective catalyst if you have a specific vision in your mind about what a healthier body is going to feel and look like this year, and that vision means more to you than slipping back into a passive, pattern-driven and ineffective routine.
2. Committing to exercise with a friend can be a double-edged sword. Your confidence in that person’s self-discipline is more important than the strength of your friendship or how much you want to “help them”. Help yourself first by choosing someone at least as reliable as you are if you do involve someone else.
3. A time-bound, restrictive diet will almost always mean a cheat at (and beyond) the finish line, which returns you to your starting point and one more failed effort. Any long-term healthy eating solution must be simple, flexible and fundamentally satisfying.
4. Your body is a function of your genes (not alterable) and your habits (highly alterable). Remembering this simple fact allows you to take full ownership of what your particular body is capable of accomplishing. Flopping on the coach and eating mac and cheese for dinner because you're exhausted is yielding your personal power. Pushing yourself until you need a minute to catch your breath and loading your muscles until they can’t continue the same pattern 40+ times a week each (in three to five separate time blocks) is claiming it.
5. Being guided (either privately or in a small group setting) by a nationally certified exercise expert will be much more constructive and efficient than managing your program on your own, unless you’re an authority on balance, sequencing, pacing, relative resistance loads, mode mixing, optimal work/rest ratios, long-term capacity progressions, diminishing returns by exercise type and appropriate modifications for any injuries or conditions you may have. There’s a reason personal training and small group exercise class led by personal trainers is the fasted growing segment of the fitness market.

Keeping these points in mind could be the critical factor in your finally resolving the on-again/off-again healthy lifestyle problem.

Dan Taylor, ACE, NASM-CPT, is owner and head trainer at Pleasanton-based Tri Valley Trainer. They offer private and group fitness solutions and an innovative, medically endorsed web-based group fat loss coaching program.