Advice for Keeping Your New Year's Resolutions

Every January, with the dawning of another year, the annual New Year's resolution becomes one of those good ideas that never seems to work out as intended. Many people still approach the year's start with a laundry list of do's and don'ts that they hope can make a change in their lives.

What you're doing whenever you're changing habits is replacing one set of memories with another. That's a really important piece of it. When you're thinking about habit change and making New Year's resolutions, the most difficult New Year's resolutions for people to keep are usually the ones where they are trying to stop doing something.

Stopping an action means trying to take memories that you have and replacing them with nothing. People say they're going to eat less or they're going to stop smoking or they're going to stop drinking. One of the reasons it's hard to do that is now you're replacing this behavior with no behavior. So what you need to do is replace a habit with some other behavior.

Come up with an alternate behavior any time you want to do what you hope to stop. If you are trying to give up milkshakes, for example, switch to a fruit smoothie or a healthier food item when you would normally indulge. In situations where you can't come up with a behavior to replace the old one, find something that competes with it. For example, if you want to quit smoking, adopt the goal to run a 5K race. It is hard to remain a smoker if you are trying to train for a race.

Good luck with your resolutions this year, and please don't hesitate to email Keeb Fitness for more advice.