Revisiting Your New Year’s Resolutions and How to Adjust

Now that you are a few months out from your New Year’s resolution, looking at how it’s going and understanding the best way forward from here is essential. After these months, you may just be getting comfortable with the changes you made to improve your health. Whether you’ve cut something out or added something healthy into your diet or exercise routine, it’s important to remember that the results can take a while, and now is not the time to measure your results.

That’s one of the most common reasons New Year’s resolutions don’t work – we expect everything to happen too quickly.

Remember, our bodies are tuned to search for homeostasis – balance. However, balance does not necessarily mean health. You can be balanced at a higher weight than usual or with less than ideal physical states that your body considers normal. Instead, we want to break that balance and return to better health. This requires turning an action into a habit.

If you are finding it challenging to stay on track, one of the first things you can do is evaluate whether your goals were appropriate and attainable in the first place. This is the first reason patients can’t lose enough or regain their health in their desired time.

It’s also important to remember that your health decline probably happened over many months and years. As such, don’t expect your return to health to be swift or easy. The longer it took to get to this place, the longer it will likely take to bounce back.

You Also Want to Evaluate Whether You Have Solid Intermediate Goals

Hopefully, you have set goals for yourself that show your progress toward the ultimate victory. Without these smaller goals, you don’t give yourself the enjoyment of incremental wins. Those incremental wins keep you motivated and show you you’re going in the right direction. If you don’t have current incremental goals, it’s never too late to develop them, and you can keep your lofty goals intact.

Don’t get discouraged because that will undoubtedly lead you to modify or entirely quit your push toward health. This is not to say that your frustration is not legitimate—quite the opposite. You may be frustrated that you’re not losing enough, not getting to your goals in the time you expected, or frustrated over lost time. No matter the frustration, embrace it, and don’t let it derail you.

Along with frustration often comes a sense of failure, which can add stress to your life. This becomes a vicious cycle where stress takes your eye away from the ultimate prize, you miss your goals, and in turn, you cause more stress.

The Bottom Line

So much of what we do to get back to a healthy place requires a delicate balance of physical and psychological motivation; it’s also vital to remember that you can’t always do it yourself and sometimes need help. Whether it’s family, friends or your medical team, enlist the help and expertise of those around you who will likely be thrilled to be a part of your transformation and health goals. You never know; you may inspire somebody to join you and turn their lives around.