The year 2023 is already here. As is usually the case, the transition to 2023 is another opportunity for many people to evaluate their lives and set new goals.
However, it can be difficult to stay committed to your resolutions. This is especially the case with health-related resolutions, as they often require major changes to your lifestyle. Change can be hard, even when in your best interest.
So, you’re not alone if you’ve experienced challenges keeping your health resolutions in 2022. Nonetheless, with a new year approaching, you can have another attempt to improve your health through lifestyle changes.
This article explores how you can stay true to health resolutions in 2023.
What are health resolutions?
Health resolutions reflect your commitment to making changes to your lifestyle to become healthy. While health resolutions might be more important for people suffering from poor health, that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Even relatively healthy people can make health resolutions to further improve their lifestyles.
Maintaining health resolutions typically requires forming new habits and giving up old ones. This could be in the form of exercising daily, drinking more water or ensuring at least 8 hours of sleep.
If you’ve ever tried to start a habit or give up one, you probably already know it can be a frustrating process. This explains why health resolutions are easy to make but even easier to break. Nevertheless, the first step to keeping your health resolutions is setting the right goals.
Making the right health resolutions
Selecting the right health resolutions is vital to achieving your desired result. One crucial step to take in this regard is understanding what aspects of your lifestyle or health require improvement. As you can expect, health issues differ from person to person.
Thus, if you are a workaholic who tends to get minimal sleep, setting a resolution to sleep up to 7 hours every day might be more important for you. On the other hand, a smoker would likely need to prioritize quitting as their health resolution.
Overall, it’s essential to be honest with yourself about your habits and how they affect your health. This way, you identify areas of your lifestyle that require modification and make relevant health resolutions.
Another aspect of making health resolutions you should consider is keeping your goals realistic. It can be tempting to set big goals when making resolutions.
However, this practice almost always results in you failing to meet your target. This is because unrealistic goals contribute to you getting frustrated and giving up quickly. As such, it is better to set smaller goals that are definable and feasible and work your way up from there.
That said, here are some of the common health resolutions you can set for yourself:
- Exercising regularly: Undoubtedly, getting more physical activity is an excellent step for your health. However, we are not saying you should simply spend money purchasing gym memberships in 2023.
It might be better to start with physical activities that fit into your schedule and that you actually love and enjoy. This can be taking daily walks, hiking, or even cycling. You can, of course, get into the gym if that works for you.
It’s also worth noting that exercising is not only limited to those trying to lose weight. Getting more gym activity can also be an excellent health resolution if you are trying to become more muscular. You can also try bulking with creatine supplements, which build muscle and strength while improving your exercise performance. - Quitting substance abuse: This is one of the most challenging health resolutions to achieve, thanks to the effect of addiction. Nevertheless, with enough dedication, you can successfully maintain a resolution to quit harmful substances such as cigarettes, alcohol, and other drugs. Unlike some other resolutions, quitting substance abuse may require external help from family and friends or health professionals.
In addition to quitting, you can consider exploring various health-oriented programs that provide detoxification. This way, you can eliminate the substances already within your system. - Getting quality sleep: The world has become incredibly fast-paced, with people working long hours and sleeping less. However, this situation has negatively affected the general health of most people. Sleep deprivation can increase the risk of heart disease or even depression.
So, making quality sleep a health resolution can be a significant step in improving your health. Of course, it’d require proper scheduling, reducing caffeine intake, and using digital devices less before sleep. This way, you can improve both the quality and quantity of your sleep. - Eating healthy: Your diet is one of the most critical determinants of your health. You can improve your diet by including more vegetables, fruits, and other plant-based foods. These are rich in fiber and other beneficial nutrients.
Notably, studies have shown that a healthy diet can help reduce risk factors for heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and sometimes even forms of cancer. However, maintaining a healthy diet throughout the year requires a lot of effort in terms of planning and discipline.
How you can stick to your health resolutions
As previously mentioned, maintaining your health resolutions throughout the year can be challenging. Notwithstanding, there are some steps you can take to ensure you meet your goals:
Set up a conducive environment
Your environment is a key element to consider when maintaining health resolutions. It’s crucial that you understand and establish the physical and mental support you might require to meet your goals.
This could mean getting the right gear for whatever physical activities you want to get into. It could also mean throwing away your lighter and ashtray if you are trying to stop smoking. The goal is simply to incentivize keeping your health resolutions and ridding your environment of elements that may derail these goals.
If you’re finding it difficult to create a suitable environment on your own, you can opt for enrolling in wellness centers. These wellness centers allow you to stay as long as necessary to get into a healthy lifestyle while also providing the resources you may require in this journey.
Self-monitoring
It’s very easy to make broad and vague health resolutions. However, to truly improve your lifestyle, you need to make resolutions that can be defined so that you can track and monitor your progress. This way, you can remain accountable to yourself and build new habits.
Self-monitoring may require keeping a journal of your targets and whether you’ve met them. Similarly, you can leverage tools like the habit building app wannawell.
Plan for obstacles
It’s essential to be realistic about your journey towards a healthy lifestyle. Do not simply expect to achieve targets as planned, as this may not be feasible.
Instead, you should also create a plan for when you get distracted or fail to meet your goals. In essence, you should be ready to get back on track even if you slip.
This may involve you reminding yourself why your health resolutions were important to you in the first place and why you cannot afford to give up. You can also have an accountability partner, such as a relative or friend, to help you get back on track.
Conclusion
We often underestimate how even little changes to our daily habits can have an outsized impact on our health. This is why health resolutions are important. Setting these goals allows you to manage your lifestyle and improve your chances of leading a long, healthy, and fulfilling life.
