Solutions For Keeping Your Resolutions
by A.E. Sadler

Within 24 hours of the ball dropping in Times Square, the deed is done. Creatures of habit that we are, we humans engage in the annual ritual of making — and, more often than not, breaking — New Year’s resolutions. Off-key renditions of Auld Lang Syne trigger a painful reminder: Are we where we envisioned we’d be by now when we made last year’s resolutions? Hope still springing eternal, we try again and resolve to be healthier, kinder, better people who spend more time with loved ones, lose that extra weight, and hunker down on those career, financial, and recreational goals — even though by mid-February most of us will have slipped back into our old ways. Next January, we’ll wind up repeating the same process. And so it goes. The gluttony of the holidays and subsequent attempts to atone for it through the asceticism of New Year’s resolutions elapse with the same inevitability as the waxing and waning of the moon. And yet, maybe this time things will be different. What follows are a number of resolutions people commonly make and strategies to let 2004 be the year you keep them.

Losing It
Business Wire reported that a 2002 study by Hase-Schannen Research revealed losing weight topped the list of American New Year’s resolutions. The same research also showed that survey respondents rated it the second most difficult goal to achieve, right behind quitting smoking. Another survey reported that 75 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 54 make diet and weight loss resolutions each January, even though half of the respondents lost minimal pounds or gained weight instead.

What gives?
“A lot of people aren’t that driven when it comes to fitness,” says Bret Camesa, a fitness professional who’s grown accustomed to watching gym memberships bloat come January 1 only to deflate in equal proportion, usually before Valentine’s Day. “The same thing with diet. The holidays usually lead to some kind of gluttonous behavior and out of guilt people start working out in the New Year.”

Common pitfalls, Camesa points out, are fad diets, which cause people to lose muscle mass, as well as fat and feelings of discouragement when falling off the wagon. “I tell people that it’s good to have a cheat day,” he explains. “Just try to make up for it where you have four days in a row of eating well.”

Fitness trainer Chris Teufel believes that part of the key to keeping a fitness-oriented resolution is inherent in the act of making it. He explains, “One positive aspect of New Year’s resolutions is that your new diet or exercise regimen is driven by a commitment to real change, and not just by a desire to look good for an upcoming wedding or vacation. The best results I see are in clients who come in with an attitude of positive change.”

So how do those with the best intentions and strongest commitments in January maintain momentum come March and beyond? “If you want to make it work, do it the right way from the start. Three leading causes for the high attrition rates at fitness clubs are boredom, lack of results, and injury. A good fitness plan focuses on safety, variety, and efficiency, in both your diet and workout routine,” says Teufel.

New And Improved
Consistent reps may help improve the shape of your torso, but if it’s your nose you want to change, you’ll need professional assistance of another kind.

“There is an increase in the number of cosmetic procedures right after the beginning of the year,” acknowledges Robert A. Shumway, M.D., F.A.C.S., of the Shumway Institute of Laser & Cosmetic Surgery. “People want to look and feel more youthful and are excited to include cosmetic enhancements in their New Year’s goals.”

Martin Abelar, D.D.S, also sees the New Year as an optimal time for image enhancement. “January seems to be a very good time for improving your smile. As with many New Year’s resolutions, improving your smile often gets put off until such time when a new beginning is appropriate. So why not start out the year right?” he says.

David S. Eshom, D.D.S., sees a surge in patients wanting to make over their smiles during this time as well. “I think it comes along with New Year’s resolutions,” he notes, observing that adding cosmetic enhancements to one’s list of proposed self-improvements has emerged as a relatively recent phenomenon.

In image-conscious Southern California, the options and those who provide them have swelled to vast and overwhelming dimensions. How do you figure out where to begin? Even celebrities, whose livelihoods depend on maintaining a flawlessly youthful appearance, have been known to misstep in this area.

In her book The Beauty Battle, Wendy Lewis advises consulting with three surgeons and checking their credentials before undergoing any operation. She also suggests asking each physician about their training, the frequency and duration over which they have performed the procedure you are considering, and the percentage of patients who have experienced significant complications. Another point: request to see post-operative photographs of their other patients and, if you can, meet with one of them to view firsthand the kind of results you can expect.

“You really need to know what’s bothering you, what it is that’s the problem,” adds plastic surgeon Carol Hollan, M.D. She concurs that getting information and establishing a relationship with your surgeon are pivotal.

A Brand New Look
Taking that personal inventory in front of the mirror may impel you toward your closet rather than cosmetic surgery. With so many demands on our time and attention, it’s easy to let your fashion sense wind up in a stylistic cul-de-sac. That’s why Gracie Mahvi, a former fashion designer and current owner of Gracie in Rancho Santa Fe, decided to provide her customers with a new service: overhauling their wardrobes.

“First I go into their closet and visualize how [the person] organizes,” says Mahvi. “Is she the kind of person who likes [it] color-coordinated or by outfit or separating tops and bottoms? I want to make her still feel comfortable in her own closet. Next, we determine what pieces she really needs.”

Mahvi’s approach involves going through each piece one by one, eliciting a “yes” or “no” as to what’s worth keeping. Starting with these existing items, she works with the individual to develop a style and make new outfits. Intimately knowing your preferences and needs enables her to keep a watchful eye for incoming merchandise at her boutique that fits what you’re looking for. “As things come in to my shop, I will call,” she says.

Kimberly of Carlsbad-based K2 Fashion Consulting advises people to step out of their box a little. “Try something you’re not used to wearing,” she suggests. The mall has become her office, since a big part of her service is shopping for clients. And she tends to choose outfits that they wouldn’t ever have picked for themselves, items that often become their favorites. “It helps you break out of your rut,” is her explanation.

Getting Organized
“The day after Christmas and New Year’s, the phones go ballistic,” says Dana Korey. Over the three years since she started Away With Clutter, a professional organizing firm, she’s witnessed an annual boom in business. “It’s always that clean slate time,” she explains.

Anyone wanting a jumpstart on organizing their home or workplace can call in Korey’s swat team of trained professionals and have even the most chaotic, clutter-ridden digs overhauled within the space of 24 hours. “If someone is dealing with a lifetime’s worth of clutterand backlog, they get overwhelmed and stop. ”Korey compares this to the dieter who loses motivation when, after a month, they don’t see any weight loss. “We’re able to create results very fast,” she says, “and that’s very inspirational.”

Think of it as enlisting a personal trainer to help you keep your New Year’s resolution for becoming organized. Decluttering your world not only reduces stress, according to Korey, it increases your efficiency. “The average businessperson wastes up to an hour a day of productivity due to being disorganized,” she points out. Imagine all of the other New Year’s resolutions you’ll have time to fulfill if you no longer have to spend an hour each morning running around your house in search of your car keys.

Giving Back
Becoming a better you obviously means more than building a healthier body or an orderly environment. It extends to the impact you have on your fellow human beings and the world around you. Sir Francis Bacon’s conviction that “in charity there is no excess” is certainly a noble ideal worthy of our aspirations.

Giving of yourself doesn’t necessarily begin and end with writing a check. Volunteering your time and services can prove equally, possibly even more profound than donating hard-earned cash.

“Often you get more out of it than the person that you’re helping,” says Kim Knouse of Volunteer San Diego. Her organization coordinates volunteers for some 650 nonprofit agencies throughout the county and strives to make participating easy and convenient for people who are too busy to orchestrate such opportunities for themselves. Their Flexible Volunteer Program lets you dedicate a weeknight, weekend, even a lunch hour to feeding the homeless, caring for an abandoned pet, helping abused women or any number of worthy causes.

Another plus, according to Knouse, is that volunteerism, unlike diet and exercise, is one resolution that tends to stick: “Something gets inside of you. We find that people want to do it more throughout the year. Once the bug bites, they’re done.”

Keeping Those Resolutions
Alan Cohen, author of Why Your Life Sucks (And What You Can Do About It), told PR Newswire that making New Year’s resolutions does more harm than good because it creates an exaggerated amount of pressure for people. And statistics show that most New Year’s resolutions fail.

If you find that this to be true in your case, consider trying something different in 2004. When the going gets tough, hire a life coach.

According to Harvard Management Update, coaching involves helping someone define clear goals and establish a timetable for meeting them. “We are very much oriented towards people’s goals and dreams,” life coach and North County resident Laura Hendershot explains. She points out that, whereas therapists focus on your past, coaches work with your future.

As a relatively new field, professional coaching has yet to generate the bounty of hard data necessary to substantiate its efficacy beyond all reasonable doubt. Yet research to date demonstrates positive results. A recent University of Sydney study, for instance, found that life coaching facilitated goal attainment and may point the way to our understanding how to effect purposeful change.

Hendershot finds that as many as 90 percent of her clients make health or maintaining an exercise program,that second-most difficult of New Year’s resolutions, one of their goals. “They really have achievement in that area,” she says. “They hire a coach and all of a sudden they have accountability.”

But she believes that virtually any area of your life can benefit from this practice. “Someone could be in a rut in their career and not know what to do next,” Hendershot offers as an example. “There’s perhaps some reluctance to move forward — we become very comfortable where we are — but at another level we know we could be doing so much better. It comes down to the coach looking at that client and seeing if they’re doing everything they can do. They may work on completely changing the person’s field. It’s very helpful to make this transition with a coach.”

Spending as little as a half-hour each week on the phone with someone who keeps you focused on your goals, it appears, might just make all the difference. If that happens, though, you’ll need to brainstorm a whole new list of never-before-tried resolutions when 2005 rolls around. And that’s something worth doing for the sheer novelty alone.