Ross Walker: Don’t wait until the new year to make resolutions

It’s that time of the year when the very common burnout sets in and most of our thoughts turn to the Christmas break. Although Christmas should always be a time for rest, reflection and rejuvenation it often becomes a time for excessive partying and overeating.

Rather than heading towards the inevitable Christmas weight gain, the very common New Year’s Day hangover and the perennially failed New Year’s resolutions, why not resolve before the holiday season gets into full swing to really make this Christmas break the chance to make a fresh start.

Decide what life habits you want to break and which ones are not working for you. A very good start here is to create a journal or a diary where you actually write down in decreasing order of importance your life goals for the coming year including the list of bad habits that are not serving you well and you wish to change.

What is stopping you right now from not making these changes? For example, if you want to stop smoking but every weekend you head down to the hotel with your friends and have a few drinks, this will certainly weaken your resolve and this patter may need to change.

On the other hand, some people are comfort eaters, often sitting in front of the television consuming unnecessary food. Rather than doing so, why not go for a walk instead?

When you change a bad habit that has occupied a significant amount of your time, whether it be excessive eating, drinking or smoking, it should be replaced with a better, more, healthier habit. One of the greatest examples I have witnessed in my medical practice was a patient of mine who was a serious alcoholic. He consumed around 20 schooners of beer per day leading to a severe dilated cardiomyopathy (heart muscle disease). This gentleman made the decision to stop alcohol on my very strong advice and replaced this with an interest in Egyptology. All of the money he used to spend on alcohol was placed in a bank account. He had eventually saved up enough money to take him and his wife to Egypt where he had the trip of a lifetime. His severe heart disease returned to normal and he is still a regular patient of mine 25 years later.

Any new habit requires discipline. You need to discipline yourself for a full month for this new habit to be trained and to become a normal part of your life. It is very important, also, to associate rewards with this new habit. For example, once I had destroyed my knee through too much sport, I needed to replace my very enjoyable soccer and squash games with a less rigorous form of exercise. I therefore started using an exercise bike 10 years ago but my reward was to watch an enjoyable TV series whilst exercising to associate pleasure with the habit rather than the boredom of the exercise bike for 45 minutes staring out the window. I am delighted to say that I have already broken three exercise bikes through excessive use and I’m now using my fourth bike.

A number of years ago I wrote a book Diets Don’t Work. The reason diets don’t work is that you go on a diet in the same way as you go on a holiday. You always come back from the holiday. When you have created new, good and healthy habits, these need to stay with you for the rest of your life. You need to have a commitment to maintaining these habits as part of your new way of thinking.

Life is not about making the big decision to be healthy and happy, it’s about making 30 to 50 small decisions every day of your life. Decisions like, ‘I won’t eat that biscuit, I’ll walk up the stairs rather than take the escalator or I will not yell at that fool who just cut in front of me in the traffic’. These are split second decisions that can either take you towards good health and happiness or bad health and unhappiness. Why wait for the new year to make these decisions and resolutions? Why not start right now before the, often bad, habits of the Christmas break take over.

IMPORTANT LEGAL INFO This article is of a general nature and FYI only, because it doesn’t take into account your personal health requirements or existing medical conditions. That means it’s not personalised health advice and shouldn’t be relied upon as if it is. Before making a health-related decision, you should work out if the info is appropriate for your situation and get professional medical advice.