At the beginning of a new year, many people make resolutions to lose weight, eat healthier, work out more or a combination of the three.
Often, going “cold turkey” and trying out restrictive diets can lead to those resolutions falling apart by the end of January.
As the first month of the new year comes to a close, Jessica Zucchino, a Family and Consumer Sciences Agent for North Carolina Cooperative Extension in Mitchell County, provided some helpful tips on how to maintain a healthy lifestyle and reboot that resolution.
To make a shift toward a healthier lifestyle, many people attempt to make huge changes in order to reap the benefits quickly, like restrictive diets and rigid work out plans.
A lot of the time, Zucchino said, those strategies set people up for failure.
“When you think about restrictive diets or the elimination style diets, all the energy you have is going toward what you’re not supposed to have,” she said. “Then you start thinking about when you can cheat, and they even call them ‘cheat meals’ so it’s just that mentality of, at some point, you get to cheat the system. That mentality makes it really challenging, because you know at some point you’re going to fail.”
Instead, Zucchino said focusing on small pattern changes is a much more realistic and effective way to make lasting changes.
“One thing that I find works well for me, is focusing on a pattern rather than an individual part of healthy habits,” she said. “One of the recommendations the USDA has is to make half of your plate fruits and vegetables, which I personally find really manageable and easy to remember, compared to remembering two and a half cups of vegetables. It’s much easier to conceptualize as I’m moving throughout my day, being busy and becoming hungry.”
To make long-term changes, Zucchino also suggested choosing one habit at a time and making small changes because it can be much less daunting.
“If you’re trying to change your habits, just choosing one thing at a time to change is much more manageable,” she said. “It can be really tempting, especially at this time of the year, to change everything and start anew and the whole ‘new year, new me’ mentality, but the reality is, that’s really difficult and not really sustainable.”
Zucchino emphasized the importance of how those manageable changes should be framed, too.
“Broad, simple goals that are easy to have in your mind go a lot further than a restrictive diet or activity plan with a lot of rules,” she said. “A lot of times, especially this time of year, people say, ‘I need to get to the gym more, I need to lift weights more’ and the USDA’s physical activity guidelines have a broad recommendation just to move more. Some movement is better than no movement.”
When you frame a goal to be more active as “moving more” or eating healthier as “half of my plate should be fruits and vegetables,” it’s easier to remember and more sustainable, Zucchino said.
“It’s easier for me if I think about it as moving more rather than setting a goal that says every day I need to get in 20 minutes of running,” she said. “That seems really daunting that I have seven days a week where I need to do something. Just setting the goal of moving more each day, like maybe parking farther away at the grocery store or at work, will help me actually do that just by framing it differently.”
Physical activity also has numerous benefits to mental health, Zucchino pointed out. In the USDA’s physical activity guidelines, benefits listed include improved cognition, reduced risk of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, reduced anxiety and reduced risk of depression.
“These are all things that most folks would identify as wanting,” Zucchino said. “Just knowing that, if we move more, we can avoid more of these mental health issues or improve those if we’re already in those circumstances. It’s really encouraging. And this isn’t saying you have to do a ton of exercise every day to have these benefits. You can get them through small steps.”
Zucchino noted the importance dietary and physical activity have over long-term health and said if people just make small life-style shifts, they can reap the benefits over time.
“The dietary and physical activity patterns that we establish certainly have an influence over our long-term health,” Zucchino said. “And, of course, there are a lot of different factors, including chronic diseases, but the good news is that our dietary choices and our physical activity are things that we have control over. If we make those small changes, over time, those small changes accumulate and before we know it, we have made this complete lifestyle shift.”
Because everything the cooperative extension does is evidence-based, Zucchino said she relies heavily on the USDA’s MyPlate guide and its physical activity guidelines.