Anytime is a good time to establish new habits but in our culture, January seems to be the most popular time to do so. So let’s talk about the ‘R word’ (Resolutation). Since our beat around here is health, nutrition and diet I will confine my remarks to those topics.
We all know most ‘diets’ don’t work whether you start it in January or any other time of year. Why is that? Might I suggest it’s because most diets are impossible to maintain. Anyone remember the cabbage soup diet? Are you really going to eat cabbage soup for your entire life? I didn’t think so. Obviously, the cabbage soup diet is an extreme example, but most diets are similar in that they are basically impossible to maintain for more than a few weeks, and after you stop there is often a vicious rebound.
Rather than a ‘diet’ you may want to consider a new way of eating that is healthier and consistent with your health goals… whether that health goal is to lose weight, or to have better control of your diabetes, or something else.
If it is going to truly work and provide some type of lasting change it must be something you can maintain over the long haul. If you do this the weight loss will be slower but much more sustainable. Once you establish this new habit, simply let time work its magic. If you know someone who has lost over 100 lbs. (whether they had bariatric surgery or not) and kept it off for more than 5 years, they almost certainly changed their habits in a way that was sustainable.
In other words, they changed to something they could do for their whole life and that’s a resolution you can keep!
By Dr. Michael Bilof
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