Three Resolutions You Can Keep This Year

Does the idea of starting a new year excite you or does it carry unease and perhaps a touch of dread?

Those are your judgments gearing up to take you on another emotional roller coaster. Destination? Not peace. Many of us begin the next twelve months with health-related goals as the framework for those expectations. Allow me to offer a different, and much more satisfying and purposeful approach to the idea of resolving to practice a more healthful set of habits.

Here’s the idea: Line your resolutions up around a single guiding principle. That will both help make the intentions more compatible and serve to support the underlying philosophy. My recommendation for the guiding principle?

Be Kind to Yourself

Here are three resolutions that further that lofty and worthwhile goal:

• Resolve to consider your fitness program as means of making your life better both in the long term and the short term. We all know that exercising regularly improves general health and vitality and most of us understand that the effects on brain health, mood and a host of other capacities and risk factors are powerful and positive. But working out is hard work. It requires a lot of effort, over and over again. If you think of it as drudgery, that will be your experience. The fix is to question the validity of that story you’ve written about exercise as a big inconvenience and a drain on your energy. Then sample with an open mind different activities and facilities you’ve read or heard about that might be a better fit and settle in when you think you have found something that feels right. For many, expertise and chemistry with the right trainer is the answer, while for others, the sense of community with upbeat and friendly peers fits the bill. Maybe it’s a top shelf health club or a simple neighborhood class offered through the city. Allowing for fitness to be a source of accomplishment and self-care makes the process much easier and more enjoyable. Hint: It works on yard word and kitchen clean up too.

• Resolve to view eating as something you do for your body, rather than to your body. What if you asked yourself before you prepared your food or ordered your meal how your body will respond to what you’re about to put in your mouth? No judgement or guilt is welcome in this process; just an open mind and transparency with yourself. Is it possible you would choose something else? Maybe you would eat it more slowly, enjoy it more fully, crave it less often and less urgently? Perhaps even feel the payoff earlier and be less inclined to consume as much? Does it seem reasonable that eating, in part, to help your body feel and operate more robustly and easily could influence your choices in a way that feels aligned with your highest good?

• Resolve to notice when you forget to apply the first two ideas, forgive yourself, and then choose again. Mindfulness is perhaps the simplest and most powerful practice we can use to better our lives. And you don’t need to study for decades or live in a Buddhist monastery to master it. Simply notice without judgment. Notice what’s around you, notice your physical experience, and, most of all, notice your judgments. We build stories about every thought that pops into our heads. And we usually use those stories to attack ourselves or others through condemnation or guilt. Doesn’t that suck? So simply notice when a thought comes about eating or exercise. Are you holding yourself to an open mind? Does your exercise experience feel positive and satisfying in the moment and over time? Are you being kind to your body and asking it what it needs and to what it would respond best? Have you forgotten to ask yourself these questions? Of course you did!

So, forgive, and choose again.

Happy New Year.

Dan Taylor, ACE, NASM-CPT, is owner and head trainer at Pleasanton-based Tri Valley Trainer. They provide personal training and small group fitness solutions at their studio and an innovative, medically endorsed web-based group healthy eating coaching program.