5 Steps to Make Your New Year’s Nutrition Resolution Successful

Happy New Year!

As the new year arrives people analyze their lives and wish to bring positive changes. So, everyone comes up with a New Year's resolution and hopes to stick to it throughout the year. Some do become successful, but most of the resolutions don’t make it past January. I wondered why it was that hard and took a plunge into human psychology. Here are the reasons why resolutions fail that I could find out from my research.

1. The resolution is not specific enough. Jonathan Alpert, the author of "Be Fearless: Change Your Life in 28 Days," says in his interview with Business Insider, that people make vague goals like “lose weight” and “exercise more” and fail to stick to them.

2. Not framing positively. People frame their resolution with negativity e.g., “I am not going to eat junk food or not get drunk.”

3. Goals are too ambitious. I am going to run a marathon or lose 50 pounds in two months is too ambitious a goal if not planned out very well.

4. Making a resolution for others. Sometimes people make resolutions by getting influenced by their friends without knowing what they really want. Sometimes people make career advancement goals or earn degrees or certifications in new fields under the influence of others like uncles, aunts, or very successful friends, instead of knowing one’s own personality or needs.

5. Lack of planning and thought behind it. Most resolutions fail because they are not well planned. People greatly underestimate the power of planning to be successful in anything they want to achieve.

Well, what if we are determined to stick to our resolution the whole year! Many of you reading this blog may choose to go plant-based in 2020. Now let’s explore how to do it right.

1. Make a very specific resolution. Most people don't successfully follow through on their resolutions — largely because they're so general and non-specific. That's where science and research can help. Using specific, science-backed resolutions, you can boost your chances of successfully transforming your life in the New Year. By watching documentaries and reading books, convince yourself to come up with your goal. Here, it could be completely changing your lifestyle to plant-based in 3 years. See this earlier blog post which elaborates upon the following approach. Here are a few methods to go plant-based!

1. You can go plant-based suddenly overnight, but plan rigorously and find a lot of social and emotional support to stick to your resolution.

2. Go a little slower and give up one item each month (Red meat in January, poultry in February, etc.) gaining total control by the end of the year and not having to resort back to old bad-eating habits again.

3. Another way that works with great success is going week by week. For example, all lunches could be plant-based. Then, once this is achieved for a few weeks, go for plant-based dinners as well. This strategy allows one to called acquire “new territory” and “hold the ground that is conquered.” The beauty of this strategy is that even if progress stalls for a while we will have made a sustainable move toward our goal.  

2. Frame your resolution positively. Positive thinking gives the emotional strength to turn any resolution into a success. Instead of saying “I am not going to eat meat,” positively frame it as “I will eat more whole food plant-based foods,” or “I will taste more variety of plant-based dishes.” This will shift your focus from thinking about not eating meat and the feeling that you are giving up something up, to positively thinking about eating plant-based which is much healthier. It will also make the quest for new dishes exciting and something to look forward to.

3. Make reachable and reasonable goals. Making simple and reasonable goals is the key to success. You can simplify your goal into bite-size portions that you can achieve step by step. Then evaluate your results and tweak or change your strategy if needed.

4. Make a resolution only for you. Researchers at Harvard Medical School agree. They wrote in a 2012 blog post that “long-lasting change is most likely when it's self-motivated and rooted in positive thinking.” Do change the one thing which really bothers you. Feel yourself thoroughly convinced that it's you who wants to see that change in your life. Getting influenced initially by your friends or by a motivational speaker is okay, but you as an individual need to understand the change is only good if it makes one happier than before. 

 5.  Plan, evaluate, reward and replan. 

Plan- Making any project successful needs a great amount of planning. Even though we cannot anticipate every scenario or every situation, giving a bit of thought may help avoid many disasters. Plan situations like birthday parties or eat-out dinner invitations and how you are going to handle them. Are you going to eat at home before you leave or going to let the host know that you are following a certain diet? Plan when you have a busy work week: what are the quick meals that you can plan ahead of time. What are your strategies for travel? Are you going to forgive yourself on that day, or are you going to pack your food with you? 

Evaluate- Even after you plan ahead, you may still find it hard to stick to your resolution. In those cases, evaluate your plan. Look for the things which worked well and inculcate those things more in your planning for the subsequent weeks. If you thought that you will cook meals at home, see how that experience was. Can you continue with that strategy? If the experience wasn’t so good, what changes can you implement for next time?

Reward- Rewarding yourself after small achievements is a great emotional booster. It will motivate you more likely to stay on the path. It makes you feel like you have done it and if you follow your strategy you will do it again too.

Re-plan- After evaluating, if you feel something was a total disaster, then you are most likely to give up. That’s the mistake most people make and never get back on track. Here one needs to replan. Accept the failure and plan again. See what and why things didn’t work out. See how you can change them and make a new plan. Again follow the same steps and if it worked well for you, great! If it failed, then replan till you achieve it. When we are traveling in unknown territory, uncertainty and failures are the passengers that we are going to take with us in our back seat.

I bumped across something online which is the one thing to remember if you forget all else, “Prior Planning & Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.”

I wish all the great success to all of you on this wonderful journey of a whole food plant-based lifestyle!