Why have ONE New Year resolution for a whole year?

Coming to the end of the year and we all begin to think of the year gone, what we have accomplished, review what we have succeeded and whether we haven’t done enough.
Then come the thoughts as to what we want from next year and what kind of person we would like to be. It is only natural.

Then we thinking of an AMAZING new year resolution we would love to stick to for a whole year. But…..is it realistic?

For example…..take one (or all eight!) of the following new year resolutions I hear the most of:

I want to save money
I want to lift more
I want to move house
I want to eat cleaner
I want to lose weight
I want to earn more money
I want to quit/limit drinking
I want to quit smoking

General goals which I hear a lot of people saying.

Two things:

1. Specifically how? How much money do you want to save? How much more do you want to lift and for which movement? Where would you like to move to? Lose how much weight? Eat cleaner what? How do you want to earn more?

2. What are YOU going to do to accomplish this? What are you prepared to do to get to these goals? How much are you going to save per week or month?
Are you going to pre-prepare your meals to eat cleaner? Are you going to limit eating out to avoid alcohol? Are you going to buy a pack of gum every time you enter a garage/off-license/shop to avoid buying cigarettes?

This is why I am not a big fan of New Year resolutions. It becomes a “thing” that you put major pressure on yourself to do and when you don’t have enough in the bank account to save that month, eat a biscuit or you have a glass of wine, you see it as a failure and then it drives into spending all your savings, eating the whole packet of biscuits or drinking a whole brewery.

In other words…..a BINGE of some form or another.

My advise would be to set ONE goal for the first 3-4 months of the year and have a PLAN.

I want to save £100 a month.

I want to limit my drinking to 2 glasses of wine at the weekend.

I would like to swap my afternoon cake with an apple and nut butter.

I want to add one extra training session into my week based around…… (insert “strength”, “cardio”, “gymnastics” “classes” here).

Then, once you have hit your goal by April, you can introduce a new goal and always strive to improve yourself and your lifestyle.

Who says a new years resolution has to be one for the whole year? Start small and add throughout the year.

Don’t set yourself up for a crash and burn so that you don’t feel good about yourself by the end of 2016. Be amazing from the beginning and know that we all have setbacks. It is part of being human and it makes for a pretty awesome journey. No roller coaster blows your mind from always going up. Its the down that gives you the rush.

The Body Blog by Karrina Howe: http://www.karrinahowe.co.uk