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(HealthNewsDigest.com) – STANFORD, Calif. — Don’t despair if you’re already struggling to live up to your resolutions for 2010. Despite the difficulty of changing bad habits, experts at the Stanford University School of Medicine believe New Year’s resolutions serve a purpose.
“Resolutions reflect the unspoken recognition that another year has passed—we’re getting older and closer to death, and if we’re going to make changes in our lives, we had better get to it,” said psychiatrist David Spiegel, MD, the Jack, Samuel and Lulu Willson Professor in Medicine. “Making resolutions is not silly. Making good ones, and sticking to them is a good idea.”
And sticking with them is tough, which is why we should expect to struggle in the early days as we try to change how we behave. “With any resolution you make, you’re going to drop the commitment over and over and over again,” said Mark Abramson, DDS, who runs stress-reduction courses at Stanford. “If your deeper commitment is to take care of yourself, you can get back to the resolution and actually make slipping up part of the process.”
The results of a 2002 study on resolutions should be encouraging. A paper in the Journal of Clinical Psychology showed that people who made resolutions were 10 times more successful at changing their behavior than those who wanted to make a change but didn’t resolve to do so.
Because three of the most common subjects for resolutions are diet, exercise and stress, the medical school communications office sought tips from Stanford experts on how to eat better, become more active and reduce stress in our lives.
1. Don’t ‘go on’ a diet
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So, you swore off sugar for 2010 and were doing fine until you got back to work and spotted the office candy jar. And now you can’t resist grabbing a handful of goodies and gobbling them down, dealing a sweet but fatal blow to your diet plans for the year.
That’s probably because making such drastic resolutions rarely works, said nutrition expert Christopher Gardner.
“A few people can decide to go cold turkey and completely eliminate some part of their diet forever,” said Gardner, PhD, associate professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. “But for most of us, ‘all-or-nothing’ typically means ‘deprivation-for-as-long-as-it-can-be-tolerated’ and then back to ‘all.’ It’s more practical to make dietary changes that you can realistically imagine following for the rest of your life.”
Rather than “going on” a diet (which inevitably means “going off” of it at some point), Gardner suggested a few steps to help you adopt healthier eating habits:
Choose smaller portions, and take the time to savor the flavors.
Make a weekly trip to a local farmer’s market part of your routine. “Go with friends, try new foods and enjoy the free samples,” Gardner said. “You’ll be eating seasonal, local, fresher foods that way.”
When you buy packaged foods, check the labels and select the items with ingredients you recognize rather than those that read like a chemistry experiment.
Gardner said it may also be helpful to focus on more than just your waistline in selecting the foods you eat. “Healthier foods are almost always fresher, local, more sustainable and more ethical,” he said, pointing to examples such as grass-fed vs. factory-farmed beef. “For many people, the motivation of eating ‘right for the planet’ is even greater than the desire to look better or lose weight.”
Regardless of whether your motivations are personal or global, give yourself some wiggle room. Gardner pointed to an 80:20 rule espoused by local restaurateur and organic food proponent Jesse Cool. Simply stated, the rule means that 80 percent of the time you should make the right food choice for your health, or for the planet or for any reason that motivates you. For the remaining 20 percent, “allow yourself some decadence for the sheer pleasure of it,” Gardner said. “Just don’t let that 20 percent increase to 30 percent or 40 percent or more.”
2. Move it to lose it
Michael Baird/Flickr.com Many people vow each Jan. 1 to get more exercise, but often injure themselves within the first few days of their new routine by trying to do too much too fast. Exercise physiologist Joyce Hanna said the key to avoiding injury and discouragement is setting a series of small goals that build upon your current level of activity.
“If you’re not doing any exercise right now, don’t jump into something that you’re not able to maintain,” said Hanna, MA, MS, associate director of the Health Improvement Program for Stanford faculty and staff. “Radical, sudden changes usually bring about radical, sudden defeat.”
Instead, Hanna suggested setting a specific short-term goal each week. For instance, instead of telling yourself, “I will get fit this year,” make a commitment such as, “I will walk for 30 minutes after work on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.”
“Pick something that you can achieve,” Hanna said. “This will boost your self-confidence and motivation and, as the weeks go by, enable you to do more and more.”
Because relapses are common for those trying to establish new health habits, Hanna suggested coming up with a plan for how to deal with exercise setbacks. For example, if you find that you aren’t working out as frequently as you hoped, ask yourself these questions:
Was my goal a realistic one?
Did it take into account changes in my obligations and life circumstance?
Did it go against my natural tendencies?
And, perhaps most importantly, don’t beat yourself up about it. Rather than chastising yourself with thoughts like, “I’m such a lazy person that I’ll never be able to maintain an exercise program,” a better message would be, “I messed up this week but I don’t need to be perfect in doing this; I’ll just start again tomorrow.”
“Treat yourself as you would a friend,” Hanna advised.
3. Easy does it
Dey/Flickr.comAfter a financially tumultuous 2009, it’s likely that many people made stress reduction one of their resolutions for the new year. So what do experts have to say about the best way to lower anxiety and improve mental health?
Abramson, who teaches stress-reduction courses at Stanford, said you can lower your anxiety level by bringing yourself into the present moment. “Most of our stress isn’t about what’s happening now, but what we’re worried about in the future or what we’re thinking about in the past,” he explained. “Think of the present moment and deal with what’s in front of you.”
One of the best ways to concentrate on the present is to pay attention to your breathing. Abramson said that when you’re aware of the in and out of breathing, “you’re not worried about the breath you took 10 minutes ago or the one you’re going to take 10 minutes from now.”
Abramson also emphasized that the kind of breathing is important. While many of us breathe shallowly by flexing the rib cage, it’s deep, abdominal breathing—filling the lungs by expanding the diaphragm muscle—that provides a signal for the body to relax. There are classes for people who aren’t sure how to do this type of breathing; Abramson’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Management class, for example, is offered quarterly through the Health Improvement Program.
Spiegel, the psychiatry professor who has been studying stress for decades, suggested another method he calls FACES for reducing stress. The steps are:
Face, rather than flee from, the things that cause your stress.
Alter your perception of the problem.
Cope actively; find some aspect of the problem that you can do something about and then do it.
Express emotion.
Social support—creating a network of family and friends help people feel and be well.
Abramson and Spiegel also emphasized the importance of sticking to your resolution and not berating yourself if you slip up and, say, stress out and lose your cool in a certain situation.
“If you beat yourself up or get upset at yourself, that’s just adding another wound,” said Abramson. “If all else fails, be kind to yourself.”
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