Here's to a happy new you

No looking back: 2003 is the year to shape up
Sasha Slater13 April 2012

Last New Year's Eve, my friends and I sat round the dinner table and at 11.58pm we all gave each other three resolutions to keep for the year. I recall that my best friend instructed me to 'learn the trombone up to grade 5' among other demands. And my brother-in-law was to take up ballet. We have both conspicuously failed.

Apparently this is understandable - we were going about the business all wrong. Keeping your New Year resolutions, particularly if it involves overhauling your lifestyle, is a serious task. The key, according to Kathleen Cox, a psychologist and expert in lifestyle changes, is to plan ahead. If you're serious about setting a goal, whether it's to run the marathon, give up smoking or cut out sticky buns forever, you have to answer these five questions:

When are you going to do it? How are you going to do it? Where are you going to do it? With whom are you going to do it? And, finally, what may happen to stop you doing it?

Keep your resolutions realistic - there's no point planning to learn salsa dancing as a glamorous way to keep fit if you live eight Tube stops from the nearest dance studio and don't have a partner to go with. Nor should you eschew wheat if you don't know of a shop that stocks rye bread. 'Don't set yourself up to fail,' says Kathleen Cox. 'It'll just depress you. Plan in detail how you are going to achieve whatever the resolution is. And only make one. If it's a really big resolution, it will have a knockon effect on the rest of your life.' It can also, she continues, be helpful to make your decision public: 'That way you risk losing face if you fail, which will help stiffen your backbone.' As a bonus, your friends will stop offering to buy you a drink if they know you're detoxing for a month.

Roping in someone else for moral support can be extremely helpful, agrees Mark Jarvis of Richard Smedley Training, who has honed the bodies of Julia Ormond, Nicolas Cage and Miranda Richardson, among others. 'It's a lot harder to cancel a visit to the gym if it's a date you've made with someone else, whether it's a personal trainer or just a friend. There's nothing easier than thinking up excuses not to go if you're on your own.'

However, Cox does point out that you should choose who you tell with care. 'We are all jealous of people who manage to achieve the impossible,' she warns. 'So if you want to quit smoking but you live with a smoker, do it discreetly or they may be irritated enough to offer you a puff of theirs just to sabotage your smugness.' But if you do succumb and have a secret smoke, or even a dozen, don't let that discourage you. 'The resolution isn't null and void if you slip,' reassures Cox. 'It's not all or nothing. Giving up a long-held habit takes incremental change.'

Sophie Boss, a diet guru who runs Beyond Chocolate workshops, which help women explore their relationship with food, agrees. 'Making a commitment to change how you eat is fine, so long as you don't see it as a punishment and then feel a failure for not sticking to it.' Of course, this advice relies on your ability to set a goal that isn't completely unrealistic. 'Whatever you do, don't say "I'm only going to eat 1,000 calories a dayî, because you will inevitably stick to it for two days and then eat thousands of extra calories on the third.' This is true even of how you phrase your resolutions. Don't, Boss warns, ever say 'I'm going to lose weight', or 'I'm going to give up smoking'. Instead, think of changing your lifestyle in positive ways by saying, 'I'm going to look fabulous in a size 10 dress' or 'I'm going to save thousands of pounds by not smoking'.

Fundamentally, giving up a long-held bad habit involves reappraising your image of yourself. 'We all have a set of beliefs about who we are and they are frequently very negative as well as being quite wrong,' says Sarah Whittaker of Inside Out Intuitive Profiling, who advises politicians on their image. 'The only gap between achieving what we want and not achieving it is our own lack of confidence. If you want to be fit but look at yourself in the mirror and think 'I am an unathletic person' then you are automatically programming yourself to skip the gym and eat an éclair instead.' She believes, rather frighteningly, that we should stand in front of a full-length mirror with our eventual goal in mind and work out what misconceptions about ourselves will stop us achieving the goal. We should then look back at the goal in mind and work out how we can overcome these wrong-headed beliefs in order to achieve it.


Who knows, if you actually look long and hard enough in the mirror, you may be able to turn an 'I am a fat frump' self-assessment into an 'I am a sex goddess' one without having to shed a pound.

Mark Jarvis jarvisairborne@aol.com

Sophie Boss www.beyondchocolate.co.uk

Sarah Whittaker www.insideoutnet.co.uk

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