More than just Muscle

Once again that time has come where the calendar ticks over to the next year and a huge number of people wipe the slate clean and set resolutions for the new year. Were you one of these people? How’s it working out for you so far? Are you hoping to achieve weight loss/muscle gain/fitness/better relationships?

[Happy New Year everyone!]

The problem is that most of the strength of the resolution rests on the emotional connections that people have with the new year. It’s easy to say what you want, especially when everyone else seems to be doing it too, but creating action is another thing entirely. And yet it is keeping it going that is clearly what it is all about.

I have found that there are two ways in which you can make resolutions, and one way outperforms the other by a huge margin. In fact to the best of my knowledge I’ve never met anyone who actually got this first way to work.

1. Use New Year as the starting point for your resolutions.

Once new year has past it is impossible to maintain the emotions that created the resolutions. Most people will find that they fail within the first couple of weeks (and probably the biggest drop off is within the first couple of days!). It is really difficult to get back on the wagon again because it is no longer new year and so it doesn’t feel like making a fresh start. People will also create resolutions that are doomed to fail. They are one liners. They don’t take into account that life happens, that mistakes will be made, that there will be times when you can’t work on your goal for weeks or months at a time and they provide no plan for starting up again except for waiting for next year to role around. Once the new year finally arrives they have a whole year of attachements to various failures to try and battle through.

This is not a successful strategy!

2. Starting your new resolution now, in this second, whenever that second may be.

Technically you can make these resolutions at new year too however because they lack the need for new year to happen there is not the dependancy on the emotion to succeed.

Strategy two uses different tactics to make it work. First there is the realisation that there will be some planning involved. If you have the goal of losing weight this may mean that you have to plan how you are going to avoid going past the places where you pick up the foods that you know aren’t good for you on a regular basis, it also means planning rewards once you’ve hit smaller goals. Strategy two allows you to fail, you can fall off the wagon for a week or a month at a time and you don’t need to feel like a total failure. Feel like you have made mistakes certainly… but use those mistakes to learn so that you can reset your goals and get started again immediately. Lastly strategy two creates a great sense of achievement and competition if you like such things. When New Year rolls around you will have already been working on your resolutions for days/weeks/months and you’ll have learned things and had success where others have yet to even begin.

I hope you haven’t fallen into the trap this year of setting a New Year’s resolution but if you have hopefully I’ve provided some info that will help you reset your goals and create whatever success you wish for this year.

If you’re looking to lose weight one of the best programs out there is EAT STOP EAT. This program allows you to literally eat whichever foods you want to and provides the best system to keep everything in check. I’ve been using this system for over 2 years now and while losing weight was never my goal I haven’t gained any body fat in that time and it never felt like a diet.