With the New Year comes New Year’s resolutions; goals and aspirations that we set for ourselves to meet by the end. Personally, I don’t see the point of making New Year’s resolutions; you can make resolutions at any point of the year and making them at the very end doesn’t make them any more special than making them in the middle of the year, but I digress. How many of us promise ourselves that we are going to be thirty, forty, even fifty pounds less by the end of the brand new year? I know I promised myself I would be forty pounds lighter last year, but here I am now, ten pounds heavier. I don’t need funny Facebook memes and posts to tell me that I’m not the only one who has dealt with this kind of failure. Many of us fall victim to the “new-year-new-body” resolution, only to enter the New Year with the same, or larger, body. The question now is: how do we stop failing at this resolution?

It’s no surprise that the most common New Year’s resolution is weight loss and for a good reason, we all want a stunning beach body that brings forth a new wave of confidence and self-love [1]. New gym memberships are created after New Year’s Day, but by mid-February 60% of these new memberships go unused [2]. So why is it that so many people fail at this weight loss resolution? Let’s answer this question with another question: why do so many people fail at losing weight? We can go into detail about how dieting alone won’t help you lose weight or how fad diets earned the synonym “crash diets," but I’d like to focus on one reason I feel many people over look: setting (an) unrealistic goal(s).

One thing I learned over the course of many weight loss failures is that setting long term goals is discouraging. My goal was to be forty pounds less, have rock hard abs and glutes, and take up either gymnastics or a martial art by the end of one year; this was a three part of phase, lose weight, then tone, then learn. When I wanted to lose weight I was eager to see results, big results, and fast. Weighing myself at the end of every week and seeing that I only lost two pounds didn’t leave me happy for long. In fact by the third week I had lost all enthusiasm, I remember thinking, “oh my goodness, I put in so much work, only lost six pounds, and on top of that I’m not even at the one-fourth mark of my target weight!” So I did what many of us are prone to do when faced with this situation: I quit. I went right back to enjoying video games on my couch and eating delicious fatty foods. At the time, my decision was based on a cost-benefit analysis where the cost of eating bland salads and drinking bitter green tea to curb my appetite was far greater than the benefit of relaxing and enjoying myself. Only three weeks into my resolution and I had felt the pain associated with giving up so much and getting back so little; and according to my resolution, I would have to endure this pain for an entire year. No thank you, that’s too much for me. Lo and behold, the reason I am now ten pounds heavier; but this experience did leave me a little wiser on the topic of New Year’s weight loss and weight loss in general.

Looking back at my decision I figure that if I had set up multiple, small, manageable goals, rather than one large goal, I would probably be forty pounds lighter, toned, and able to perform a perfect split. I would feel the triumph and satisfaction with achieving these goals and would most likely not feel discouraged. In fact, with every small success my enthusiasm would grow stronger and the urge to submit to the pain would become weaker. This is what so many people who make these weight loss resolutions fail to realize, one large goal is unmanageable and will most likely result in a failure. Promising yourself that by next year you will be totally transformed will lead to discouragement, and that only makes the goal harder to achieve than it already is. So what’s the best New Year’s weight loss resolution?

Start out small, resolve to lose one to two pounds by the end of the week, eat an apple in place of chips for five days, or even drink a cup of green tea before bed for three days. The idea is to set short-term, doable goals, so try not to make them exceed a week and do a little research on what is actually humanely possible to achieve. A friend of mine told me she was going to lose fifteen pounds in two weeks, I’m sure you can imagine how that went for her!