Over the last few years, there have been drastic changes throughout your life. You’ve had to make adjustments to everything from your work schedule to day-to-day life and priorities.
While your life and priorities have changed, your New Year’s resolutions might not have changed much in the past few years.
According to a New Year’s survey, the three most popular New Year’s resolutions are (1):

1. To exercise more
2. To lose weight
3. To get more organized

While New Year’s resolutions are a great way to set priorities and kick off the new year, most people quickly discard them by the end of January.
Just because you’ve made a New Year’s resolution doesn’t mean it magically happens without putting in the work.
While you prioritize your health at the beginning of the year, there are many reasons why you drop your resolutions after a few weeks or, if you’re lucky, after a few months.
Now, let’s explore what may be affecting your ability to achieve your New Year’s goals to improve your health and get organized.

5 Simple Ways to Keep You on Track With Your New Year’s Resolutions (and Accomplish Them)

Exercise, eating well, and healthy routines are the obvious solutions to many of your health resolutions for the new year, but it’s easier said than done.
Here are five reasons why your resolutions don’t stick and suggestions on accomplishing them.

1. Set up Your Goals as a New Year’s Intentions – Not Resolutions

As you enter the new year, you’ve set up resolutions for yourself. This is an excellent step because now you have something to strive for.
But one of the main issues with resolutions is that they are all or nothing statements. Most New Year’s resolutions sound like…

• I will lose weight.
• I won’t eat junk food anymore.
• I want to be more organized.

Once you break the set goals, you find yourself no longer committing to them. Since you’ve already broken them, you see no point in keeping your resolutions.
Maybe your resolution is to stop eating junk food. But on January 2nd, you sit down and find yourself devouring a whole bag of potato chips. You tell yourself that there is no point restricting yourself anymore since you’ve already eaten one bag. As the year continues, you fall back to old habits.
Setting your goals as New Year’s resolutions makes achieving them more challenging because you don’t allow yourself the flexibility and compassion needed for long-term goals.
SHiFT™ to: Instead of resolutions, set intentions for the new year. Unlike resolutions that focus on set goals, intentions focus on the mindset to drive you towards your goals with more flexibility.

1. Set up Your Goals as a New Year’s Intentions – Not Resolutions

As you enter the new year, you’ve set up resolutions for yourself. This is an excellent step because now you have something to strive for.
But one of the main issues with resolutions is that they are all or nothing statements. Most New Year’s resolutions sound like…

• I will lose weight.
• I won’t eat junk food anymore.
• I want to be more organized.

Once you break the set goals, you find yourself no longer committing to them. Since you’ve already broken them, you see no point in keeping your resolutions.
Maybe your resolution is to stop eating junk food. But on January 2nd, you sit down and find yourself devouring a whole bag of potato chips. You tell yourself that there is no point restricting yourself anymore since you’ve already eaten one bag. As the year continues, you fall back to old habits.
Setting your goals as New Year’s resolutions makes achieving them more challenging because you don’t allow yourself the flexibility and compassion needed for long-term goals.
SHiFT™ to: Instead of resolutions, set intentions for the new year. Unlike resolutions that focus on set goals, intentions focus on the mindset to drive you towards your goals with more flexibility.

2. Make Changes So Your Habits Work for You

Your New Year’s resolution may say that health is your most important priority, but what are your daily habits telling you?

• Have you been working late into the night and skipping meals?
• Have you been completing errands left and right and “forgetting” to exercise?
• Have you been working so hard that you don’t have the extra energy to exercise?

It’s easy to let your health become secondary to your daily responsibilities.
By the time you’re done completing your everyday to-do’s, you’re exhausted. Exercising after a long day feels like torture, especially when all your body wants to do is rest. It’s so easy to tell yourself that you’ll exercise the following day, that you do it again and again only to find the year is over and you’ve barely exercised at all.
Carve out a specific time for your priorities. If your goal is to exercise more, set a specific time to exercise each day or week, but don’t beat yourself up if you miss a day.
SHiFT™ to: Organize your day to fit how you work best.
If you feel exhausted after a long day, make time in the morning to exercise before you tackle all your other work. That way, you can be proud of yourself and enjoy the rest of the day knowing that you completed your goal. If you like working out after your day is over, then do that. The key is to find out what works best for you and organize your schedule that way.

3. Organize Your Space and Time

Being organized is hard.
You struggle with it because you’re getting pulled in a million directions, and it’s hard to stay organized when you don’t have time for yourself.
Your resolution to get healthier and more organized this year is a great way to create more time for yourself. Many people don’t realize that being organized goes hand in hand with being healthy. But since you are here, you’re already a few steps ahead.
Organizing your space and schedule has a huge role in creating healthy habits and living a healthy life.
Organizing your space means you have less clutter to deal with and more room to focus on what’s important. Having an organized and clean space provides a welcoming environment for you to thrive in.
For example, a clutter-free kitchen equipped with your favorite tools makes you excited and eager to cook healthy meals. If your kitchen is messy, you’d order take-out instead of digging through a cluttered kitchen to make one meal.
Organizing your schedule means you waste less time thinking about what to do and more time checking off your most important tasks.
You live and work in a fast-paced world where everything needs to happen right away — emails, texts, meetings, etc. Take 10-20 minutes the night before to write down what you want to accomplish the next day.
If you don’t prioritize your tasks, you get pulled in different directions and never complete tasks for the day. If you don’t set your schedule, someone will do it for you.
SHiFT™ to: Take time out of your day to actively plan how you want tomorrow to look like. Also, look around your home and find ways to organize it to align with your New Year’s intentions.

4. Set Sleeping Appointments

According to the CDC, 1 in 3 adults don’t get seven or more hours of sleep every day (2). With the rise of technology and lists of things to do, it’s no wonder you don’t get enough sleep in a day.
Since you haven’t been sleeping properly, it may have a huge impact on how your body moves, how your mind thinks, how you react, and how your body looks.
Without proper sleep, you increase your body’s health risks, mental stress, and emotional distress (3,4,5). A study from Oxford Academic shows that reduced sleep increases the chances of future weight gain (6).
Hectic schedules change day to day with all the tasks you have to do, making sleep feel optional. No matter what other goals you have, put those aside and make sure you take care of your health first and make time to sleep.
Sleep is vital for all your body functions to maintain itself and allow you to live the healthiest life you deserve.
SHiFT™ to: Schedule your sleep like you schedule important meetings or appointments. Sleep isn’t optional for your health – it’s essential for your well-being.

5. Stop Going Cold Turkey on New Year’s Day

A common trend with New Year’s resolutions is that they ban everything unhealthy, making you deprive yourself right from the beginning.
You might be telling yourself no more chips, chocolate, or french fries for the next year, but when temptations come along, you find yourself indulging and breaking the promise you made to yourself.
Once the resolution is broken, you find no reason to keep your it since it’s not something you did correctly from the beginning.
You start eating more chips, chocolate, and junk food to fill the time you missed and eventually find yourself back at square one.
Cold turkey may work for some, but for most, it doesn’t.
SHiFT™ to: You don’t have to quit your favorite snacks or junk foods cold turkey. You can keep them close. A simple tip is to hide them. The act of hiding them makes them harder to access and less likely to be consumed. It also allows you peace of mind knowing that the snacks are there to indulge in when you want them.
You are allowing yourself the freedom to choose instead of prohibiting yourself completely. This exercise shows that you are in control of your life.

You Don’t Have to Go It Alone

Your New Year’s resolutions to become healthier don’t have to end and be forgotten at the end of January.
Leading a healthier life is simple but definitely not easy. It doesn’t have to be lonely either.
Whether you need help organizing your kitchen, setting up the best meal prep plan, or an accountability partner to keep you on track with your goals, I can help. With years of experience in the food industry, organization, and coaching, you’ll be achieving your resolutions this year and writing new ones next year.

Get the healthy life you want and deserve.

Warmly, Jen

1. https://www.goskills.com/Soft-Skills/Resources/Top-10-new-years-resolutions
2. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2016/p0215-enough-sleep.html
3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13668-018-0240-3
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1389945703000595
5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6281147/
6. https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/164/10/947/162270?login=true