Nailing Your New Years Resolutions. Why this is the year you should stop setting weight loss as a goal.

Done well, a New Years Resolution is a wonderful thing. What a fabulous question to put to yourself as the new year is ushered in: What do I hope that my life will look like in 12 months’ time, and how will I get myself to that place?

Working as I do in health-care, and as a dietitian in particular, so much of the work I do involves helping people identify and set meaningful goals to achieve longer-term change. We know the system works – yet without a bit of a push, most people never go ahead and set those goals!

Without goals, we run the risk of finding ourselves chasing our tails year after year – never satisfied with where we are, but never enacting the required behaviours to change the situation either.

Sadly, most people out there do not do New Years Resolutions well. They not only don’t follow through on their goals, but they also tend to set pretty bad goals in the first place.

Bad, as in, they’re actually not relevant to the person’s real needs. I have a personal suspicion that this is why most people drop their New Year’s Resolutions as quickly as they do: deep down they know it’s not important enough to be worth the hassle.

What makes a good New Years Resolutions?

Resolutions (otherwise known as goals!) need to be connected to issues that are genuinely meaningful to you, and that have the potential to make your life better in some way. Take a minute to think about your life from a few different perspectives. How happy are you with your:

• career
• relationships with family and friends
• romantic relationship/s
• health and wellbeing
• finances
• mental health and/or spiritual self

Rate each of these things out of 10 (where “10” means that things are going fantastically). If the answer for any of the above items is a 5 or less, take a moment to ask yourself WHY? Can you pin it down? Maybe you know you’ve lost touch with a lot of your friends and it saddens you. Or maybe your superannuation levels stress you out because they’re too low. Great – you’ve just identified a New Years Resolution that’s actually worthy of your energy!

When New Years Resolutions go wrong – blaming body shape when you’re actually unhappy with other things.

Now let’s look at the scenario from another perspective altogether – one in which an all-too-often-chosen New Year’s Resolution (“This year I will lose weight”) plays out.

Let’s take Person X (not a real person). Person X is unhappy in her job, feeling taken for granted, overworked and stressed. She is often snappy with her family because of how tired and strung-out she is by the time she comes home. X also feels like she should socialise more but feels overwhelmed with life. Increasingly, she has been turning to comfort eating to self-soothe.

Person X decides to set a New Years Resolution to lose weight. She convinces herself that by losing weight, she’ll finally be happy with herself, and will meet someone new to start a romantic relationship with.

What’s wrong with that? Well… there’s a lack of logical connection between the actual cause of her unhappiness and her chosen solution. How will losing weight improve the problems at her work and make her feel less overwhelmed with life?

Too often people ignore the range of things that impact upon their lives… and simply blame themselves or their body as being the problem to be “fixed” instead.

Think about it. Person X is unhappy mainly because of the knock-on effect from problems at her work. New Years Resolutions that would actually help improve her happiness might be, "This year I will:

• talk with my supervisor about what options I have for career progression in this company. I’ll set out a plan based on the feedback I get.
• commit to applying for any new jobs that come up over the next 12 months. I’m not happy in my current role and it’s time to start the process of moving on.
• leave work on time at least 3 days a week, and prioritise socialising with friends on those days.
• get to bed on time so I’m not so snappy and tired. (This will mean I’m better company when I DO socialise!)
• seek support for stopping my emotional eating if it doesn’t stabilise within a month of trying on my own.

You can almost predict that any weight loss goals X might have set would not have been kept anyway – she’s too tired and overwhelmed with life as it is!

This year, why not take the opportunity to set a really good New Years Resolution – one that you’ll want to take up because you know it’s something genuinely meaningful for you. Good luck, and Happy New Year!