As most of us find in midlife to our distress, it becomes more and more difficult to achieve and maintain our weight goals.  Not that it was ever easy, many would say.  Honestly, how many times have you made a resolution to exercise more and lose weight?  How often does it ‘stick’?  Exactly.

Dr. Michelle Segar has a PhD in Psychology and Human Behavior.  Her work has made her an acknowledged expert on the very specific topic of midlife women and health, weight loss, and exercise.  She has developed a program for midlife women that actually works.  Here she shares what she knows just in time to help you make those 2009 resolutions stick!

Before we know it New Years will be here, along with the annual ritual of making New Year’s resolutions.  But how quickly these seeming commitments fade away! If you want to think about the long-term sustainability of your resolutions this New Years, keep reading. If not, check back another time.

Between the hysteria over the “obesity epidemic”, having your doctor tell you to lose weight every year, and seeing movie starts with perfect bodies (even a few weeks after delivering twins) it is no wonder that most women lament their weight and maybe even loathe their bodies.

Ninety-nine percent of women I coach tell me in the first session that they need to lose the excess weight they are carrying. In this post, I am going to tell you what I tell my clients so that, this year, your New Year’s resolutions will be more likely to be successful.

There’s a radical but true concept for most women: Focusing on “losing weight” undermines your ability to sustain any weight you lose and leads to long-term failure.  It also prevents developing positive and life-long relationships with the very behaviors that are essential to weight control as well as other very important perks such as enhancing one’s well-being and health (exercise and dietary intake).

In addition, in the last few years there have been a few “meta-analyses” (reviews of many studies) on weight loss programs, and all show that the vast majority of people regain their weight two years after starting. If that’s not enough to convince you, think about your own experiences over the past 20-40 years with weight loss efforts. Have you been successful in sustaining your weight loss?

If you have not been successful, I want to suggest a women-specific, motivational, behavioral self-regulation framework and principles to help guide you to New Year’s resolutions that are SMART. This framework can help women who eventually wish to lose weight or who just want to start taking better care of themselves and not think about weight at all. The S.M.A.R.T. framework below will not only help you better sustain your desired behavior but also guide you to make changes that nurture not deplete you. At the very end, I’ll also offer you a variety of resources for targeted assistance if you want extra guidance. The reasons why my S.M.A.R.T. framework will work better for many women, will be clear when you read the very simple principles below.

As you end 2008, do you feel ready to make resolutions that reflect self-care and self-love instead of self-loathing or self-rejection? If so, read on. If not, don’t bother reading this information.

SUSTAINABLE: Smart New Year’s resolutions are sustainable: Smart resolutions begin with the end in mind because creating long-term sustainability is your core goal. An important reason most resolutions don’t work is that they reflect a desired long-term goal. However, most women haven’t put sufficient thought and planning into selecting a path that can be sustained for a VERY long time. If your goal is to sustain a behavior for the rest of your life (30-60 years, right?), isn’t it worth taking 6 months to 3 years to REALLY learn how to do this? Logic and wisdom tell us that anything worth doing, is worth doing right.

And the way to approach this right, is in a sequential manner. Smart New Year’s resolutions take a sequential approach to behavior change. (Most weight loss programs direct you to learn two vastly different and difficult behavioral changes (diet & exercise) at the same time. For most of us, our lives are just too busy and complicated to be able to integrate both diet and exercise into our lives at the same time. Because women juggle multiple roles and responsibilities, we have even less energy, attention, and time to learn and integrate both dietary changes and regular physical activity at the same time.) My sequential strategy has you learn ONE behavior at time so that it can stick.  After you have had adequate time to learn how to integrate that behavior into your life in a positive and consistent way, then you work on learning the next behavior. (I advise taking 3 to 12 months to really learn ONE behavior.) We wouldn’t build a house without building a solid foundation first. Why? The foundation is essential to the support of your house over its life span. Similarly, we should also build a solid foundation to maintain the behavior we desire to maintain before we start on the next one. Sometimes the smartest way to do something is also the most simple and commonsensical.