Advice to the new year’s resolutionary

With January 1 the traditional time to vow to make changes, how do we start #healthyliving?

Eating more healthily and losing weight are among the top new year's resolutions. Photo: Lisa Rathke / AP

There is always a temptation to reinvent oneself today, as if the calendar’s arbitrary completion of its annual cycle had some transformative magic to it. This “new year, new you” philosophy is, in its way, admirable because we all have the capacity to do more and be better – and when better to start than now?

We also know that within a few weeks of 2015, most of those good intentions will resemble the last piece of dried-out pizza in the back of the refrigerator, ignored and despised because it represents an unwelcome reminder of earlier frivolity. Fewer than half of Americans now even bother to make resolutions, and a quarter of those have been broken by January 7.

As The National reported this week, there is a definite science to new year's resolutions. Most recent research on the subject has focused on the acquiring and breaking of habits, when behaviour becomes so familiar that there is no conscious decision-making process involved.

In one slightly fanciful scenario, the idea is that a new year’s resolutionary will not eat a cream cake – and thus threaten the most common resolution, to lose weight – if an ingrained healthy-eating habit means eating one does not even cross their mind.

But another recent theory is that even this is wrong (well, any cream cake aficionado could have told you that). Instead, success comes from having conscious flexible goals, such as keeping to within one’s calorie allowance for five days each week, rather than ironclad rules for all seven days or even faith in acquired obliviousness to the existence of cream cakes.

The take-home message from all this is that change needs to come from within rather than externally. Although these can be complementary, which provides a natural segue into The National's #healthyliving campaign. This will manifest itself in #cycleto­workUAE on January 13.

They say it takes three weeks to gain (or break) a habit, so those starting cycling today will need to keep exercising for another week to enhance their chances of looking back in a year’s time and acknowledging a resolution that has been kept.