Keep your resolve long after New Year

January holds so much promise. For many of us, a New Year represents a fresh start: a chance to wipe the slate clean. It’s a great impetus to make lifestyle changes: whether your resolutions revolve around dieting, losing weight and eating healthily, or kicking unwanted vices like smoking or alcohol into touch.

Making sure your resolutions stick is relatively easy in the first few weeks of January – especially as many other people will be testing their willpower in similar ways.Come February, though, and the story is the same year-on-year: the sparkle surrounding your best intentions begins to fade, old habits die hard and it can be easy to slip back into your pre-New Year routines.

Making a resolution, and failing to stick to it, can be quite emotionally damaging: if you said you’d lose weight, but didn’t manage to, it can really knock your confidence. If you tried to quit smoking but ended up reaching for a lighter, it can make you feel useless and hopelessly addicted.

Willpower is the main requisite for any resolution: without it, you are bound to fail. Using willpower alone isn’t always the easiest way to a new you, though.

Weight loss resolution

If you are struggling with losing weight, don’t give in to temptation. There are myriad products available that deliver a sweet, tasty hit without sugar, from healthy snacks (such as nuts or seeds), to nutritional shakes and sweetener granules. There are also healthy alternatives to fatty foods like burgers, crisps and chocolate.

One of the best tactics to help you lose weight is to focus on the lovely meals you can have: rather than the foods you have to avoid. Investing in some decent weighing scales will help you track your progress: modern products even have “save your weight” settings to allow you to compare month by month.

If you find yourself thinking about food at inordinate times, it may be a good idea to find a way to take your mind off it: whether that’s something simple, like a new hobby, or something indulgent, like a long bath. Experiment with different “treats” until you find something you love, and those painful pangs for forbidden foods will soon rescind.

Quit smoking resolution

Giving up smoking is incredibly rewarding: for both your health, and your wallet. With prices at around £7 per pack of 20 cigarettes, you could save up to £50 per week just by kicking the habit.

The body is incredibly resilient to damage: and it will start repairing the problems caused to the circulatory system, heart and lungs once you’ve flicked the fags for good.

There are several strands to cigarette addiction that you can conquer: the physical addiction to nicotine, the habitual hand-to-mouth action of smoking, regular desk breaks for a smoke, and the fact smoking gives you something to do with fidgety fingers.

There are lots of smoking cessation aids available to help with all of these potential problems: nicotine replacement therapy will still deliver a dose of addictive nicotine, but without the harmful smoke and chemicals of a cigarette.

If you’ve come this far going “cold turkey” – that is, without any kind of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) – then congratulations. You are already a non-smoker. You’ll no doubt still get cravings, but your body is essentially over the nicotine addiction now and everything else is habitual. If you use NRT now, you’ll reignite your physical cravings for nicotine.

Instead, keep your hands busy with some healthy snacks – something crunchy like carrots or celery could help. Count up how much cash you’ve saved (and maybe buy yourself a present!), and consider doing something active (like a sport) to make the most of your new, healthier lungs.

If you’ve been using an NRT but are finding your cravings are getting harder to resist, then swapping your NRT product may be a great tactic.

There are loads of different products available: including inhalators, which replace the physical action of smoking; nicotine patches, which deliver a stream of nicotine to the body over a 24-hour period; nicotine gum and lozenges, which replace the oral habit of smoking whilst delivering nicotine to the bloodstream; and tablets, on prescription, which can help alleviate cravings.

Whatever you do, don’t give up giving up. Until you smoke again, you are a non-smoker: saving money on a daily basis and ensuring your health has a fighting chance against the diseases associated with smoking.