A Week’s Worth of New Years Resolutions for a Lifetime of Change

From The Daily Green:

The New Year’s resolutions you keep are those that become new habits. How do you create new habits? One of the best ways is to break down your larger goals – whether that’s bettering your health, as it so often is after holiday binging, bettering yourself or bettering the world at large – into bite-sized mantras and rules.

The larger goal has to be meaningful – you have to really want it – and the stepwise goals have to be specific and achievable. (I will lose weight by eating a healthier diet … by swapping my afternoon cookie habit for the habit of an afternoon carrot.)

It can be hard to tackle many goals at once, but here’s one strategy: Identify one thing to focus on each day of the week, and before long the devotion to each day’s goal will infuse the whole week’s activities. Here are some of our favorite ideas:

Meatless Mondays
You’re convinced that a vegetarian diet – or at least a diet with more vegetables than the one you eat today – is healthier for you and the planet, but despite the evidence, you can’t get on board with such a big change in your diet. So just go meatless on Mondays. It’s a growing nationwide trend with its own organization and Website. Eating vegetarian one day a week will give you the space you need to get comfortable with new vegetarian recipes, and before you know it, you’ll be eating more vegetarian meals throughout the week.

Need some help? Try one of these, our picks for the best sustainable cookbooks and food books of 2010.

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