MakingNewYear’s resolutions? Use the S.M.A.R.T. method to achieve your goals

It’s finally time to say goodbye to 2020, and hello to 2021. It seems like this year more than ever, everyone is ready to start fresh and turn a new leaf. Goal setting via New

Year’s resolutions is a standard part of this process, often revolving around the intention to improve nutrition, exercise or overall wellness and wellbeing.

Before setting your resolutions, I encourage you to consider making your goals based on health behaviors rather than body composition, or aesthetics, which usually manifest as weight loss goals. “My goal is to make my arms look more toned,” is a body-composition goal, while “I want to become stronger” is a health behavior goal. The latter is what we’re going for. These health behavior goals will teach you more about long-term behavior change, leading to improved health and happiness.

Research shows that one of the most effective ways to promote health behavior change is through goal setting, which provides a strategy for self-regulation and accountability. When setting goals, it’s important to understand how they might relate to one another. For example, someone may set an overarching, general life goal of wanting to better manage stress. That same person may also want to increase physical activity levels as a means to improve cardiovascular health. Being motivated to

achieve better heart health should ideally lead to higher or more frequent activity levels, which should then help decrease stress levels. It’s not a surprise then that a research study determined that exercise and dietary goals go hand-inhand — achieving one might make it easier to achieve the other. This reiterates the importance of focusing on those health behaviors.

While the “new year, new me” spirit is welcome, it’s important that we create goals that will set us up for successful and sustainable behavior change. The key to longterm

success is sustainability. I hope this goal setting guide utilizing the S.M.A.R.T. Method can serve as a straightforward template to help you accomplish any goal you set, at any time of the year.

Specific: Specificity is a must when it comes to making goals. Someone may set a goal of to eat more fruits and vegetables. How often? How many servings? Do you want to eat more fruits and vegetables at every meal, every day? Or just some meals, some days? Writing out a goal as specific as possible will make it easier to determine if you are accomplishing it,

and if so, how frequently.

Measurable: Making goals that can be measured will solidify specificity. Let’s say your goal is to walk more around the neighborhood. We need to know how much more — by measuring mileage, steps, frequency, time or some other metric. This doesn’t have to be anything fancy like the use of a FitBit. If you know one loop around your neighborhood is 1mile, that provides a measurable benchmark. To turn this into a trackable goal, aim to “walk two loops instead of one in the evenings, four times a week,” or “walk for 45 minutes

instead of 60 around the neighborhood in the mornings, four times a week.”

Attainable: In order to promote better health behavior, we want to set goals that are challenging, yet possible. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. It’s more effective to make a goal that is closer in proximity to achieving while keeping in mind some more distant goals as well. If you have a future goal of running a marathon, set some smaller, proximal goals to help you get there over time.

Realistic: While rising to a challenge is part of behavior change, we have to do a holistic assessment of any hurdles that may come up. If your goal is to start reading food labels to keep track of sugar, but you have never looked at a food label before, it would lead to more long-term success if some you worked toward some food label education before taking this on.

Time-based: Scientists who dedicated years researching psychological theories related to goal setting define a goal as “that which one wants to accomplish; it concerns a valued, future end state.” Time is a way to produce a specific and measurable goal. For example, by declaring the goal of “I will use one hour every Sunday afternoon to prepare my lunches for the work week,” you give yourself a fixed amount of time to focus on this task that has an end state. Using that time to prepare your lunches may keep you from purchasing convenience food or fast food, which over time, may help lower cholesterol levels. It’s all related!

Effective goals are challenging yet attainable, clear, feasible, and timely. S.M.A.R.T. goal setting is a great method to try out when making your New Year’s resolutions. Take some time to reflect on and assess your short and long-term aspirations regarding nutrition, exercise, health, or all of the above, by creating health behavior goals.

Getty Images While the “new year, new me” spirit is welcome, it’s important that we create goals that will set us up for successful and sustainable behavior change.