So You Want to Keep Your New Year's Fitness Resolution?

‘Exercise more’ and ‘lose weight’ are the top new year's resolutions year after year. This is made abundantly clear by the amount of people that flock to gyms every January and February and that the resolutions continue to come around each year. There always seems to be a better time to put your health first. Whether that’s pushing it off to next year, or even to next Monday. 

The reality is that when it comes to your health, it’s always better to start sooner rather than later, and if you actually want to keep your health goals for this year, there’s a few things you should keep in mind. 

First, when setting any goal for yourself, you should start with why you want it. Will getting healthier make you feel better? Look better? Have more energy? Stave off illness? Keeping your reasoning for the goal clear and at the forefront of your mind will be key in keeping your momentum and it will help you through more difficult moments. 

You should also consider the question ‘why not?’ What are the things that will get in your way? Why haven’t you done this before? Why might this goal fall through? What will you do when you don’t feel motivated? Is your ‘why’ powerful enough to outweigh all of the ‘why not’s’?

If you make it through all the self reflection and you’re confident in your purpose for moving forward, then I believe it really comes down to two things: consistency and enjoyment. 

These two feed off of eachother, so let’s start with the harder one: consistency. 

Ultimately, staying consistent will be the biggest factor in a new fitness, nutrition, or health habit. If you are doing this habit more often than you’re not doing it, you will see changes. If you currently don’t work out at all, even working out one day a week will produce changes, even if they’re slow. If you start working out 3 times or more, the pace of change will only accelerate. However, my point is that you just need to keep going. 

For example, if you decide you want to work out 4 times a week, you may be very good about keeping this up for a few weeks but then maybe work gets hard on week 3 and you’re not able to go at all. DO NOT take this as failure because it’s not. It’s a part of your life. So you missed one week? Big deal. The more you go, the less important that week will get. 

The first failure seems like a big deal because it’s one out of only three weeks, but if you keep going, soon it will be just one out of 6 or 10 or 20 or 100. And all those weeks where you do keep going will mean so much more than the couple of times where other things got in the way. This is why the ‘why not’ section is so important - you must have a plan for when this happens because if you just keep going you’ve already done most of the work. 

The second major factor is enjoyment. It is excruciatingly hard to stay consistent if you’re miserable and you dread your new habit. Finding a way to enjoy it is a huge factor in staying consistent and in allowing you to find satisfaction in the work towards the goal rather than just the end result. This is the perfect place to think outside the box, find inspiration online, and experiment! For example, if your goal was to eat healthier - don’t eat foods you don’t like because you feel like you have to. Find ways to cook healthier foods that taste delicious, try new recipes, or even new restaurants that have options that fit your goals. Whatever the case may be, experiment with techniques to fulfill your goal until you find some that are enjoyable for you. 

Feel free to take breaks during this experiment process as well to prevent burnout. Maybe do a couple weeks of experimenting and then take some time to stick with one idea and see how it goes. If it doesn’t work, start the process over. This way, you stay consistent while still working on finding something you enjoy.

The same techniques and routines don’t work for everyone. What works for your friend or a random social media influencer may work for you but it also might not and that’s ok! Keep trying things until you enjoy it! Once you enjoy it, the motivation to stay consistent will be that much easier to find. 

Unfortunately, the goal of getting fit or getting healthier mostly just requires hard work. There aren’t too many shortcuts to be had here. That’s why finding a way to enjoy the work and stay consistent with it are paramount to success in this area. 

This is a goal that affects only yourself and your own wellbeing which means all that work comes down to you. That can be overwhelming but at the same time, it’s empowering. Your success in this goal will always be proportional to your work, and very few outside factors can influence it. It’s up to you to find what you like, keep showing up for yourself, and eventually the results will come. 

My fitness goal is to do more varied workouts - skiing included!