Every New Year's eve people create resolutions about getting healthier. These resolutions typically incorporate things like "I want to lose lots of weight" or "from now on I'm only eating healthy foods." Wanting to improve your quality of life is a brilliant goal. The basic truth of the matter is there are not many people who don't need to make improvements to their health. At the same time, it is easy to get very gung ho when it comes to New Year's resolutions. Sadly, most of the people lost their resolution enthusiasm before spring sets in because they try to do too much too soon.

So how do you make the investment to getting healthy without going overboard? There are a couple of possibilities here. The first says to go slowly and produce small goals for yourself. The other school of thought says to think big and long-run and then prepare your route. Both schools are beneficial approaches to getting healthy and realizing your resolutions. More significantly, if you think about the larger picture it is easy to break that picture down into a number of littler pixels that you can accomplish in order. Here are several good examples.

If you want to drop fifty pounds by 2012, that breaks down to committing to drop 4.17 pounds per month, or a pound per week. That then breaks down to somewhat more than a single pound per week. That's manageable. Simply cutting the soft drinks out of your diet is enough to help you get there. Obviously just cutting out soda won't be enough to reach the fifty pounds lost goal, but it will help you build momentum as you learn approaches to keep off the pounds you shed each week.

If you are interested in animal rights and would like to grow to be a vegan, don't go vegan overnight. Your health will suffer, you'll experience withdrawals and you'll feel so awful that it will be incredibly difficult for you to stick to your new food commitment. Start out simply by eliminating one type of meat. And subsequently, after two or three weeks, cut out another type of meat. After you've ceased feeding on all of the important kinds of meat, work on cutting out the dairy products. Once you've overcome your dependence on dairy you can start looking for small ingredients in bigger foods which might be animal based (like the gelatin in jello, for example). This will help you learn what to look for on ingredients labels over a longer period of time (which can help you commit things to memory) and figure out what new things you can eat to make up for the foods that you've cut out.

There are lots of ways to get healthy over the year. New Year's resolutions certainly are a great way to get motivation in the beginning. Small goals to meet over the course of the year is how you will stay motivated past the usual resolution drop date.