New Years Resolutions that Last a Lifetime

by Dr. Kerry Graff

38% of US adults make New Years resolutions every year, with the top three all being health related: eat better, exercise more, and lose weight.  Almost everyone wants these resolutions to become permanent lifestyle changes, yet 1 in 4 quit within a week!   The second Friday of January is so notorious as the day people give up on their New Years resolutions that it has gotten the nickname “Quitters Friday.”  Fewer than 10% of those who make a resolution keep it for the entire year.  Why does this happen and what can we do to help our resolutions be more successful?   

First off, most resolutions are way too vague.  Eating better, exercising more, and losing weight are all noble resolutions, but what do they even mean?  If you don’t better define what your goal actually is and have a way to measure how well you are achieving it, how do you have any chance for success?  Because many of you reading this are involved with Love.Life Telehealth, formerly Plant Based Telehealth, I am going to focus on “eating better” as a New Years resolution to make my points.

Define the Goal- The first part of making a successful resolution is to really define the goal.  For instance, if your resolution is to “eat better”, you first need to gauge how you are eating currently so you have something to compare “better” to.   I recommend that you take the free, 2-minute, online 4Leaf Survey at www.4Leafsurvey.com to determine your baseline percentage of calories from whole plants, then use that score to set your goal for improvement.  Let’s say your baseline is 1 leaf level on the survey, meaning that you are getting about 20% of your calories from whole plants.  You might decide to set your goal to increase this to a 4 leaf level, or 80% of your calories from whole plants.  What a worthy goal!!  You would be quadrupling your healthy food intake, drastically reducing your risk for cancer, heart disease and diabetes, just to name a few benefits!  But that brings up my next point:

Assess if the Goal is Reasonable– The next step is to consider if the goal you just set is reasonable in the life that you are actually living and not just in your fantasy life where there are 36 hours in every day and things always go as planned.  If needed, adjust your goal to something that is actually doable.  For many people, setting their goal to eating at a 4Leaf level would be so much of a change all at once and give them so little wiggle room that it will make them nuts, causing them to abandon their efforts at diet improvement altogether, likely by Quitters Friday!  Whatever your initial score is, I recommend setting a goal that takes you up no more than two levels, initially.  As you gain skills and confidence, you can always increase your target.  Building on success always feels better (and is therefore more motivating in the long run) than perpetually falling short of perfection!

Track your Progress– You need to be able to track how well you are doing at achieving your resolution.  For the above example, there is a free daily version of the 4Leaf survey available online to track how well you are eating every day. (www.4leafprogram.com/all-versions-4leaf-survey/   and then click on “daily version”)  I used this meticulously in the first few months after adopting this way of eating 10 years ago and found it incredibly helpful, as have many of my patients.  Once you get the hang of eating this way, you likely won’t need to be as structured about the tracking.  That said, being accountable by doing this every day really helps with staying on track!  When I track my score daily, I hit my healthy eating goal of 4Leaf level most days of the week.  When I don’t track it, more processed food and alcohol creeps in.  We are all only human…   

Make the steps needed to reach your goal part of your resolution– How do I manage to eat at a 4Leaf level?  I food plan.  Every single bloody week.  Religiously.   By Friday night, I have a list of what I am going to be eating for meals the next week and have my shopping list ready.  By late Saturday morning, all the food I will need for the week is bought.  By the end of the weekend, much of the food is cooked and ready to eat or has at least been prepped.  And if I am going to be away over the weekend and won’t be able to do the above, I have ordered whole food, plant-based meals to be delivered.   In addition, I always have “back up” whole food, plant based meals available in my pantry (PlantStrong) or in my freezer (Whole Harvest, Daily Harvest, MamaSezz, First Seed Foods) for when life does not go as planned and I need something I can heat up quickly for a meal.   While I could make my food resolution “Eat at a 4Leaf Level every day”, a better resolution for me is “Food plan every week and overall eat at a 4Leaf level.”  First of all, if I don’t food plan, I am dead in the water, so I might as well highlight food planning because it is what absolutely has to happen in order for me to reach my goal.   And I don’t want to set my goal to eat at a 4Leaf level every single day because if I fall short on even one of the days of the week, I will feel like I failed, even though the reality is that I mostly succeeded!  While I track my score daily, I set my goal as eating at a 4leaf level overall for the week, thereby giving myself enough wiggle room to include the beer and pretzel sticks (with mustard, not the cheese sauce) at Peacemaker Brewery or to enjoy the Indian food at Flavors Restaurant that includes white rice and some oil.  Those days, I will only be getting about 70% of my calories (3Leaf level) from whole plants.   Even on the 4Leaf level days, I can have roughly 300 calories (20% of my total calories) from processed foods (or animal-based foods, but I avoid those).   It is the flexibility that makes this doable for me in the long run.  

Let’s take a brief look at the goal of “exercising more”.  Again, what would that look like and how would you achieve it?  Personally, I love my FitBit and the concept of “zone minutes”, especially since I can just strap the thing on my wrist and it all automatically records and downloads the information to my phone.  For every minute that my heart rate is between 114-130 (moderate activity), I get 1 zone minute.  For every minute that my heart rate is above 131 (vigorous activity), I get two zone minutes.  The general recommendation for exercise is to get at least 150 zone minutes in a week, which gives you about 80% of all health benefit of physical activity.   I suggest that you aim for at least 150 zone minutes a week, although if you are starting out very inactive and/or have physical limitations, you may need to work up to that gradually over time.  If you already exceed that recommendation, I suggest that you adjust your goal up to your current activity level and concentrate any health improvement efforts in other areas, rather than trying to increase this further.   For instance, setting my goal at 150 zone minutes a week wouldn’t really make sense, since I routinely get between 300-400 zone minutes a week.  But if I tried to increase my physical activity goal to 500 zone minutes a week, I would get very little additional benefit and it would likely cut into my time to food prep or engage in my stress management yoga/meditation routine.   Please remember that when you make goals for yourself, give yourself some grace when you are not always able to do what you set out to do!  Life happens!  The week I was sick with Covid, the only zone minutes I got were when my heart rate was elevated due to persistent fever, despite having taken max doses of both acetaminophen and ibuprofen!  Seriously, I slept 20 hours a day and even taking a shower was completely exhausting.   Allow yourself to be the human being that you are!  

Ok, a word or two about the goal to “lose weight”.  Stop.  Just stop.  Seriously, if the goal is just to “lose weight”, picking up a cocaine habit would work great, but ain’t nobody gonna argue that that would be a healthy approach to weight loss!  And any time you lose weight by doing something that isn’t sustainable in the long run (i.e. eating a calorie restricted diet that leaves you hungry all the time), you will fail, usually sooner rather than later.   As a result of your body’s misguided belief that you might starve to death while you are losing weight, your baseline metabolism slows, so when you resume your previous eating pattern, you gain back even more weight than you lost.  This reactive slowing down of your metabolism also makes it much harder to lose weight when you make attempts to do so in the future.   Instead of making your resolution a particular number of pounds you would like to lose (despite the fact that that resolution is both well-defined and easily measurable via your scale!) I recommend that you make your resolution about the behaviors you need to engage in consistently-your eating habits and activity levels-that will result in weight loss, without weight loss itself being the primary goal.  You likely won’t end up looking like Twiggy, but you will end up at a healthier weight, one that will be maintainable for the rest of your life.  Roller coasters are fun, but not when you are referring to the ups and downs of yo-yo dieting!  

So what are my personal health-related resolutions for 2024?

1. 300 or more zone minutes every week, unless I am significantly sick, in which case the time gets prorated for the number of healthy days
2. Weekly food planning, with the goal of getting at least 80% of calories from whole plants every week, without worrying about being perfect every single day

And guess what?  Those were my resolutions last year, too, and have been every year since I embraced the principles of lifestyle medicine 10 years ago!  Nope, I don’t look like Twiggy, but my weight is in the normal range and hasn’t fluctuated more than 2 pounds in either direction since I lost 25 pounds the first 3 months after I adopted this lifestyle.  My resolutions are the same every year, not because I fail over and over again to achieve them, but because they are healthy habits that, with rare exception, I am able to do.