Dec '25 • General discussion
New Year’s Resolution or ONE New Healthy Habit
New Year’s resolutions have a bad reputation. Ms. Johnston, a studio manager at the local Guitar Center even said her only resolution every year is to not make any new year resolutions.
Personally, I do like and set them. More like set… IT.
One.
Just one.
One resolution.
One of the common ideas I hear most often from many health coaches, personal or nutrition coaches most is that their clients have a tendency to set their goals unrealistically high.
I used to be that person. I didn’t know the goals were to high, unrealistic. For example I was writing down resolutions like:
- I will read 10 pages a day from a book.
- I will learn 10 new Spanish vocabulary words a day.
- I will run for 30 minutes a day.
- I will eat plant based every day.
- I will not eat sugar and salt anymore.
- I will clean one room of the house every day.
- I will read a chapter from the Bible every day and pray every day.
I kept failing every time.
If so, why do I still love New Year’s resolutions? What changed?
For one, I didn’t give up.
For two, I kept reducing the goals to smaller and smaller bites.
For three, I kept myself accountable to others, by paying coaches, posting snippets of my workouts, and by setting appointments with exercise buddies for walks, runs, gym sessions, etc.
Most importantly, I reduced the number of resolutions to no more than one or two realistic ones.
Also, I picked one or two words of the year for myself, connected to my small, doable goals. For example, the two words of the year 2025 for me were MINDFULNESS and FUN. I wanted to think more before I act, before I speak, before I eat, before I commit, before I do anything.
I wanted to align my actions with my top priorities: spiritual health, physical and mental health, family, friends, and my professional development.
I wanted to choose the important over the urgent.
I wanted to get into habits like eating healthier, exercising more frequently, sleeping better and more, and reducing my cortisol level.
All of these were processes I have focused on, and they helped me achieve a fair amount of weight loss. It helped keeping it off, too, which is so much more important and so much more difficult than losing the weight.
The years before I would set a goal of how many pounds to lose. That is an outcome, but behavioral science tells us it is more helpful to focus on the processes that lead us to the outcome. One of the processes I focused on was tracking my food intake in the Noom App. I didn’t do it perfectly and I missed some of the days, but I got into the habit of doing that. I tried that many times and for many years before, and the results were not even remotely comparable to when I got into the habit of just tracking it the best I can. I was now focusing of small increments of progress rather than on perfection. Once it became a daily habit, I could track it ever better and ever more detailed. It created awareness and mindful eating habits.
That is just one example of creating small, realistic goals for the year ahead. It took me to a significant amount of weight loss in 2025, and, more importantly, to maintaining it.
It worked!
Small goals focused on the processes helped me accomplish big goals and desired results by the end of the year.
Please share about your own health journey, if you wish!
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New Year’s Resolution or ONE New Healthy Habit
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