How to Keep a New Year's Resolution (and Actually Make It Stick)

Updated July 2026

Nearly two-thirds of us will make a New Year's resolution at some point, and only a small fraction will keep it. One often-cited figure puts the success rate around 8%. That's not because people are weak-willed. It's because most resolutions are built to fail: too big, too vague, and too dependent on turning your whole life upside down overnight. The good news is that a few changes to how you set the goal dramatically improve your odds, whether you're starting in January or picking yourself back up in the middle of the year.

Why do most New Year's resolutions fail?

Because they're too ambitious and too unsustainable to survive contact with real life. The typical list is long and dramatic: lose 50 pounds, go to the gym every day, quit everything at once. Each goal demands an enormous change to your daily routine, and piling several on top of each other almost guarantees you'll abandon them within days. Radical overhauls feel achievable on January 1 precisely because they're still theoretical. The moment they require actual daily effort, they collapse. Anyone who's tried the Cabbage Soup Diet knows the pattern: extreme, briefly, then over.

The problem usually isn't motivation. It's scale.

We all genuinely want to be better. That desire is real. What trips us up is that we don't account for how hard change actually is. Change IS hard, that's precisely why we're not already marathoners with perfectly sculpted bodies who speak five languages. That stuff takes an enormous amount of work. Trying counts, and you can't improve anything without it, so trying has to be part of the plan. But the other thing that has to be in the mix is reality. Most of us are only capable of small changes at any given time, and the research agrees: it's small, realistic modifications that have the greatest likelihood of sticking.

I learned this one on myself. One year I resolved to take up yoga, and it failed completely. I wasn't realistic. I knew I had a very busy year ahead, yet I declared I'd carve one to two hours out of every single week anyway. There was simply no chance of it happening, and part of giving myself grace has been coming to terms with that. The fix isn't to abandon the goal, it's to right-size it.

What actually works instead?

Small, specific changes you can sustain, built on and celebrated over time. Here's the strategy I give my patients.

Take the long view instead of chasing fast results. Aim for small changes you can keep rather than a total transformation you can't. Adding one apple to your lunch every day sounds trivial, but over a year that's three bushels of apples, with all the fiber, antioxidants, and micronutrients that come with them. Swap that apple in for a daily cookie or muffin and you cut 100 to 200 calories a day, which adds up to a 10 to 20 pound weight loss over a year, without "dieting" at all.

The same logic works for movement: a gym membership is great if you'll use it, but if that feels like too much, just add a 15-minute walk a day. It costs nothing, requires no travel, and adds up to about 365 extra miles by year's end. By the way, a 15 minute brisk walk after each meal not only helps improve your blood sugar control, it also gets you to the generally ideal 4 hours of aerobic exercise per week.

Don't let past failures define you. Even a small, short-lived success in the past proves you can make the change. If you did it once, you can do it again. Treat every prior attempt as a trial run, not a verdict.

Track your progress. Keeping a simple log of your wins, however small, keeps you motivated. Focus on the hits, not the misses. This is about self-improvement, not self-shaming.

Don't deprive yourself. Asking yourself to give up everything you love doesn't work; it just breeds cravings and an unhealthy relationship with food. If you love ice cream, don't stock a gallon in the freezer and dare yourself to resist it. Scoop a reasonable portion, eat it slowly, enjoy every bite guilt-free, and move on.

Disassociate your bad choices from your routine. Most of us have habits that pair automatically: the cookie with the sandwich, the chips with the game, the fries with the burger. Make a rule that you get one, not both, and you break the autopilot that drives a surprising amount of overeating.

Get some support. A buddy working toward the same goal makes it easier for both of you to stay on track. The real secret to Weight Watchers' decades of success was never the points; it was the non-judgmental support system of people chasing the same goal.

Be specific and realistic, and know your WHY. "Eat better" and "read more" are too vague to track. Turn them into something concrete and genuinely doable given the rest of your life. Becoming fluent in a new language may not be in the cards, but 10 minutes a day of online instruction might be. Running a marathon this year might be a distant mirage if you're currently a couch potato, but a daily walk or short run could be entirely achievable. And get clear on why the goal matters to you: to feel better, to set an example for your kids, to rely on fewer prescription medications. That WHY is the thing you're really reaching for, and keeping it in view is what carries you through the hard days.

How does eating fit into all this?

It's the easiest place to apply every principle above, because food changes are small, daily, and repeatable. That's the whole idea behind Step One Foods: a simple two-a-day substitution that delivers clinically meaningful levels of fiber, antioxidants, omega-3s, and plant sterols in place of something you were already eating. No counting, no deprivation, no upheaval, just one small sustained change that compounds into a real difference in your health, something our clinical trial proved decisively. And that's true of any good resolution: the point was never the grand gesture. It's the small thing you actually keep doing. If you want the bigger picture on why the drastic approaches backfire, I've written about that in why diets don't work.

Health is the cumulative impact of billions of small choices across a lifetime, not the product of being "perfect" for a few weeks in January. Every move toward better, however minuscule it seems on its own, will reward you in time. So here's to all of us being slightly better this year.

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