Weekly Tips for Your Peak Fitness and Wellness

This Week's Tip: Make Weight Resolutions That Stick

We at Outside In Fitness believe health neither can be boiled down to what your bathroom scale says nor is it a one-time event, so, unlike our fitness and diet center brethren, you won’t see us peddling weight loss with the New Year.

Leading a healthy lifestyle that includes regular exercise, nourishing food, stress management, and weight management is a multi-faceted affair and lifelong commitment—truly a way of life. If you plan to make a change in the upcoming year and want to be successful, we recommend that you start instead by taking weight loss out of the picture. Since weight loss itself is not a habit but an outcome of other behavior changes, you’d be setting yourself up for failure if your thinking never got past vaguely saying you’d like to lose weight.

Instead, write down what fitness, eating, or stress management habit you will start doing differently; i.e. “I will brown-bag my lunch three workdays each week.” Make sure to be specific; i.e. “I will walk Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings for one hour before work” (not simply “I will exercise more”). Also, focus on the positive addition rather than the negative subtraction; i.e. “I will eat two pieces of fruit or servings of vegetables at every meal” (not “I will give up sweets”). Lastly, seek out an accountable support system; i.e. a personal trainer, wellness coach, Weight Watchers at work group, friend, or spouse. (Just joining a gym doesn’t cut it; meeting an exercise buddy there twice a week does.) Now that’s the way to have a Happy New Year!