Before we know it New Years will be here, along with the annual ritual of making New Year’s resolutions.  But how quickly these seeming commitments fade away! If you want to think about the long-term sustainability of your resolutions this New Years, keep reading. If not, check back another time.

Between the hysteria over the “obesity epidemic”, having your doctor tell you to lose weight every year, and seeing movie starts with perfect bodies (even a few weeks after delivering twins) it is no wonder that most women lament their weight and maybe even loathe their bodies.

Ninety-nine percent of women I coach tell me in the first session that they need to lose the excess weight they are carrying. In this post, I am going to tell you what I tell my clients so that, this year, your New Year’s resolutions will be more likely to be successful.

There’s a radical but true concept for most women: Focusing on “losing weight” undermines your ability to sustain any weight you lose and leads to long-term failure.  It also prevents developing positive and life-long relationships with the very behaviors that are essential to weight control as well as other very important perks such as enhancing one’s well-being and health (exercise and dietary intake).

In addition, in the last few years there have been a few “meta-analyses” (reviews of many studies) on weight loss programs, and all show that the vast majority of people regain their weight two years after starting. If that’s not enough to convince you, think about your own experiences over the past 20-40 years with weight loss efforts. Have you been successful in sustaining your weight loss?

If you have not been successful, I want to suggest a women-specific, motivational, behavioral self-regulation framework and principles to help guide you to New Year’s resolutions that are SMART. This framework can help women who eventually wish to lose weight or who just want to start taking better care of themselves and not think about weight at all. The S.M.A.R.T. framework below will not only help you better sustain your desired behavior but also guide you to make changes that nurture not deplete you. At the very end, I’ll also offer you a variety of resources for targeted assistance if you want extra guidance. The reasons why my S.M.A.R.T. framework will work better for many women, will be clear when you read the very simple principles below.

As you end 2008, do you feel ready to make resolutions that reflect self-care and self-love instead of self-loathing or self-rejection? If so, read on. If not, don’t bother reading this information.

SUSTAINABLE: Smart New Year’s resolutions are sustainable: Smart resolutions begin with the end in mind because creating long-term sustainability is your core goal. An important reason most resolutions don’t work is that they reflect a desired long-term goal. However, most women haven’t put sufficient thought and planning into selecting a path that can be sustained for a VERY long time. If your goal is to sustain a behavior for the rest of your life (30-60 years, right?), isn’t it worth taking 6 months to 3 years to REALLY learn how to do this? Logic and wisdom tell us that anything worth doing, is worth doing right.

And the way to approach this right, is in a sequential manner. Smart New Year’s resolutions take a sequential approach to behavior change. (Most weight loss programs direct you to learn two vastly different and difficult behavioral changes (diet & exercise) at the same time. For most of us, our lives are just too busy and complicated to be able to integrate both diet and exercise into our lives at the same time. Because women juggle multiple roles and responsibilities, we have even less energy, attention, and time to learn and integrate both dietary changes and regular physical activity at the same time.) My sequential strategy has you learn ONE behavior at time so that it can stick.  After you have had adequate time to learn how to integrate that behavior into your life in a positive and consistent way, then you work on learning the next behavior. (I advise taking 3 to 12 months to really learn ONE behavior.) We wouldn’t build a house without building a solid foundation first. Why? The foundation is essential to the support of your house over its life span. Similarly, we should also build a solid foundation to maintain the behavior we desire to maintain before we start on the next one. Sometimes the smartest way to do something is also the most simple and commonsensical.

MY SELF-CARE: Smart New Year’s resolutions address women’s underlying comfort with making their self-care, well-being, and health a top priority. Regular self-care is the “oxygen mask” women must consistently put on if we are to optimally take care of ourselves (and others) and experience life to the fullest. It is very difficult to sustain any self-care behavior (i.e., exercise and healthy eating) if we don’t feel like we deserve and/or value making regular time for our own self-care. (Self-care includes creating time to move our bodies as well as other nurturing activities like reading a great book while we relax on the couch.) Targeting improved self-care attitudes and behaviors is one of the first steps a woman should take and is essential to create a solid foundation to support any health behavior that you desire to maintain for life.

ACHIEVABLE:  Smart New Year’s resolutions are achievable. This principle isn’t new to you. But I want to suggest you take it to a different level. Pretend you are in kindergarten and learning something for the first time. Give yourself permission to set VERY SMALL goals at the very beginning. Why? Because it is truly the smart thing to do! Become very consistent with these small goals. Learn what gets in your way. Learn how to overcome these things. And ONLY THEN, increase your goals – and by just a little. Keep this up. Take one – two months to learn how to add 5 – 10 minutes of physical activity to most of your days. You have your whole life to sustain physical activity (or healthy eating or another time management, etc). Why not take sufficient time to learn how to do it well? That is the only way you will be successful sustaining the behavior for the rest of your life. The mantra I teach clients is: Consistency first, then quantity.

REJECT “quick fixes”: Smart New Year’s resolutions reject “quick fixes” and unrealistic goals: Smart New Year’s resolutions are made by women who have learned, often numerous times and from firsthand experience that “quick fixes” don’t stick in the long-term. Smart women are ready to create goals based on what they can realistically attain, not goals based on false advertising and impossible cultural standards and pressures. If they desire to lose weight, they value losing it in a way that they can maintain over the long haul, instead of losing it quickly and then gaining it back.

TAILORED: Smart New Year’s resolutions are tailored to fit into your life. When you think about what behavior you want to change or thing you want to achieve, think hard about who you are. Tailoring to who you are is of utmost importance. If you don’t respect your likes, needs, and wants when selecting a behavioral path to go down it is extremely unlikely that you’ll be able to sustain it over time. If you hate the stair master, don’t include that in your new attempt to be physically active. Instead choose activities that will feel good, or at least not bad to do. If you love bread, why pick an eating plan that removes it completely?  When you decide to change in ways that respect what you want and like, you will rediscover a deep trust in yourself as you begin to reap the rewards of improved mood, energy, health, and quality of life.

If you didn’t read the November More Magazine article that my work was just featured in, e-mail me (michelle@essentialsteps.net) and I’ll be happy to send you the article.

Below is a list of resources that may help you achieve your SMART New Year’s resolutions.
Regardless of what you decide to do for your New Year’s resolutions, I wish you a wonderful, healthy, and fulfilling 2009!

If you have thoughts to share about my ideas or your own experiences with New Year’s resolutions, please comment on this blog post. I welcome all comments, including ones that disagree with me.

Please forward tell any friends, family, colleagues, or health-care providers that you think would be interested in reading these ideas.

RESOURCES TO ASSIST YOU IN ACHIEVING S.M.A.R.T. NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS:

Health at Every Size (physical activity and eating behaviors) Health at Every Size is a “movement” and an alternative approach to “dieting”. I list a few different URLs where you can read more about it. There isn’t an official website like the rest of the URLs below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_at_Every_Size, http://www.healthyweightnetwork.com/living.htm, http://www.jonrobison.net/size.html

EssentialSteps Phone Coaching with Dr. Michelle Segar (physical activity and the prioritization of self-care): www.essentialsteps.net

The Hunger Within (eating behaviors): http://www.thehungerwithin.com/

Do It Yourself Nutrition (eating behaviors): http://www.do-it-yourself-nutrition.com/

The New York Times’ fitness writer, Gina Kolata, has written two great books on the research about fitness and dieting: 1. Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth about Health and Exercise; 2.  Rethinking Thin: The New Science of Weight Loss—and the Myths and Realities of Dieting