With the holidays behind us, and the New Year’s resolutions underway, it’s a great time to talk about setting realistic nutrition-goals. First off, I want to point out that it is perfectly acceptable to modify nutritional goals over time. In fact, I recommend taking a closer look at your resolution after reading this article! Don’t be fooled into thinking that you are stuck with an overwhelming and unrealistic New Year’s resolution! You’re better off modifying your resolution to something realistic, than letting it fall by the wayside entirely.
How many times have you started to try and improve your nutrition?
And how many times has it all slowly faded away?
Now imagine if every time you set out to make a change in your diet, you did! Even if it were tiny ones, year after year, it adds up!
To make nutritional changes to your diet, keep the following in mind:
And how many times has it all slowly faded away?
Now imagine if every time you set out to make a change in your diet, you did! Even if it were tiny ones, year after year, it adds up!
To make nutritional changes to your diet, keep the following in mind:
- Don’t be vague – Goals such as eat healthier or detoxify my body, are asking to go unaccomplished! Instead, be more specific; goals such as, keeping carbohydrate intake <150g/day, or drinking 2L of water everyday, are more attainable.
- Make it measurable - It is not only important to be specific about what the change is, but also to add measurability to it. Use units that you understand to make it easy to determine if you are reaching your goal or not. If you know how to count macronutrients, then a goal such as keeping carbohydrate intake <150g/day may work for you. If you are not comfortable counting macros, then a more realistic goal might be consuming grains at only 1 meal/day.
- Choose 1 goal at a time – Pick 1 thing and stick to it! Contrary to the New Year’s resolution belief, you are not limited to 1 health change/year; you can always make a new goal in the near future (March for example). So instead of cramming a dozen farfetched ideas of your “ideal self” into one New Year’s resolution, pick one simple thing and work on it. Once it is firmly established as part of your lifestyle, work on the next change.
- Keep your long-term goal (LTG) in mind – If your LTG is to improve your body composition, then make sure your short-term goals/resolutions are moving you towards this. Drink more green tea sounds nice on a t-shirt, but will it help improve your body composition? Probably not! Consuming grains at only 1 meal/day may be a more applicable short-term goal in this case. BUT, if my LTG is to run a marathon in 6 months, then consuming grains at only 1 meal/day may not make sense. Keep your LTG in mind!
- Have a plan-of-action – You might have a great goal in mind, but if you haven’t figured out how to execute it, then you might as well have a vague, un-measurable, clump of useless ideas; you won’t accomplish it either way! Pick a day to start (if January 1st was your originally day but you are modifying your goal after reading this, just pick a new day! Don’t worry, there’s no hurry.). When you have a day in mind, make sure you know exactly how you are going to carry out your goal from that day on. If your goal is consuming grains at only 1 meal/day, have the appropriate foods in your fridge for that day to facilitate this. This may mean changing your shopping habits; buying fewer grain products and more fruits and veggies to fill their place in other meals. Facilitate your success! Of course it will be a task at first, but it only gets easier. Think about this next time you are at the store; if you don’t buy that bag of chips now, you won’t be able to eat it later!