Sustaining healthy resolutions

Weight loss is a frequent and frequently unsuccessful new year's resolution. There's a reason for that: Its hard work. Want to make your weight loss resolution stick? Here are a few tips to help keep it sustainable:

1. Aim for the long term: Being overweight is unhealthy over the long term, and losing excess weight is only healthy when sustained over years. So seek long term change over immediate results. Lose weight slowly, over many months, by modifying your lifestyle in a sustainable manner.

2. It's math, not magic. Weight loss is a numbers game: Consume more calories than you burn and you gain weight. Burn more calories than you consume, and you lose weight. Don't obsess about the exact number of calories that equals a pound of weight loss. Eat fewer calories than normal while maintaining your regular activity level, or consume the same amount and get more active, and you'll lose weight. Consume a bit less and get a bit more active and you'll lose even more.

3. Choose filling foods. Celery, apples, or whole wheat bread fill you up with healthy fiber and fluid and few calories. Conveniently the main source of "empty calories" are foods with no nutritional benefit, and many healthy foods are filling. Craving a fatty snack? Nuts are laden with satisfying healthy fat, or douse your salad with extra virgin olive oil.

4. Avoid unrealistic exercise ambitions. Let's face it, if you don't already spend an hour-a-day in the gym, you aren't likely to be able to stick to such a routine long term. Reach for the low hanging fruit: Park your car in a distant corner of the lot and walk farther to the store. Take the stairs not the elevator. Walk a couple of times around the house when you go out to check the mail. Tempted by exercise machines? Try something basic, like a treadmill that lets you walk while watching evening T.V.

3. Avoid fad diets. They don't work and can be unhealthy or dangerous. High protein, low carb diets, for example, increase heart disease risk. And common sense dictates that choosing cheese and bacon over whole wheat bread is a bad idea.

4. Avoid supplements. These are probably the most dangerous diet option. These unproven, generally dangerous products have three main aims: Reduce your appetite and speed metabolism, make fat pass through you, or act as diuretics. In each case the results can be harmful, occasionally deadly. Ephedra-based products have been pulled from most markets because they caused heart attacks, seizures and death. More recently Hydroxycut was the world's most popular weight loss supplement, until it was linked with liver failure (about 20 cases were reported, but since 99% of such harms typically go unreported, the likely number of liver-failure cases was probably around 2,000). Unfortunately the active ingredient is still available, but should be avoided.

Resolving for a healthy 2010 is a great idea, but make your resolution sustainable to avoid disappointment