Author: Kevin Dickinson / Source: Big Think
- The top three New Year’s resolutions for 2018 were to eat healthier, get more exercise, and save more money. Care to guess what the top three are this year?
- We check in with experts to devise strategies for tackling the most common New Year’s resolutions.
- Knowing exactly what you want to accomplish and how you will do it can help increase your chances of success in 2019.
With New Year’s rounding the corner, everyone is sharing their 2019 resolutions, and it’s giving us that auld déjà vu. According to a 2017 YouGov survey, the top three resolutions for 2018 were eating healthier, getting more exercise, and saving more money. According to a 2018 survey, the top resolutions for next year are—wait for it—to exercise more, lose weight, and save money.
Clearly, we’ve missed the mark. To kick off New Year’s right, let’s look at last year’s most popular resolutions and see how we may be able to make them happen in 2019.
Eat healthier
(Photo from Flickr)
Eating healthier for your 2019 resolution doesn’t have to be so…stark.
Eating better is a laudable goal, one many of us could strive to improve on. Don’t fall for dietary fads, though. They help us neither live healthier nor lose weight.
“Everyone is blaming dieters for regaining weight they lose, and that’s just wrong—it’s not their fault they regain weight, and it’s not about willpower, or any lack thereof,” Dr. Traci Mann, of the University of Minnesota’s Health and Eating Lab, told the Washington Post.
Mann notes diets trigger three physiological changes that make it difficult for us to maintain them. The first is neurological (dieters’ brains become programmed to notice food more); the second is hormonal (diets increase the hormones that make people feel hungry); and the third is biological (when you try to lose weight, your body starts to store calories as fat).
“For practically any diet—crazy or not crazy sounding—in that first 6 to 12 months, people can lose about 10 percent of their starting weight,” Mann continues. “But the short run isn’t the whole story. Everyone acts like the short run is the whole story, and that anything that happens later is the dieter’s fault and not really part of the diet.”
If your resolution is to eat healthier, don’t diet. Speak with your doctor to devise healthy meal plans that don’t starve your body but focuses on healthier foods—fruits, vegetables, less salt, more fish, and so on—that you can enjoy for the long run.
Get more exercise
Again, don’t start exercising with the goal of losing weight. Many factors combine to create your metabolic rate, including basic body functions, digestive functions, and physical activity. Physical activity only accounts for 10 to 30 percent of the total rate, and exercise is an even smaller subset of that.
With that said, exercise is one of the best habits for maintaining a healthy mind and body and increasing quality of life. Here are two tips to make it stick.
First, don’t push yourself to exhaustion every workout session. Trainer Firas Zahabi argues that consistency in training will benefit you far more.
“Let’s say the maximum number of pull-ups you can do is ten,” Zahabi explains. “Should I make you do ten pull-ups on our workout? No, I’m going to make you do five, because I’m setting you up to work the next day. The next day we’re going to do five. And then we’re going to do six.”
If you can do ten pull-ups but need a three days to recover, then the maximum number you can do a week is eight. But if you can do five a day consistently, you can manage 35 pull-ups a week. Whatever the exercise, Zahabi’s flow-state method allows you to increase volume without sore muscles.
Then, reward yourself immediately after the workout. As Charles Duhigg told Big Think, enjoying a reward, such as a piece of chocolate, immediately after the workout wires your brain to associate exercise with that pleasure. Soon the endorphins will kick in at the thought of the exercise, with or without the chocolate.
Save more money
(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)
Not an ideal way to start saving in 2019, but better that some people’s plan.
We all need an emergency fund or to save for retirement, but everyday expenses cut deeper into our paychecks with each year.
According to the USAA Educational Foundation, one way to help you save is to pay yourself a committed percentage first. Figure out how much of your monthly gross you can safety set aside—they recommend 10 to 20 percent—and treat it like taxes. It comes right off the top. No excuses.
Another good saving technique is pay down your credit card bill as quickly as possible. In 2018, the average interest rate on a new credit card hit a record of 16.71 percent. Meanwhile, the average savings account’s annual percentage yield is a mere 0.09 percent. Kill the credit card…
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