Stick-With-It Strategies for Fitness Success

About this time every year, many of our self-improvement resolutions center around changing our lifestyle habits. Yet even when we have the best intentions, our resolutions are often circling the drain by about Feb. 15, as we revert to ingrained behavior patterns.

Sure, we'd all be fit, healthy and energetic if we could just get into the habits of exercising regularly and eating nutritious foods, and break the habit of downing a pint of Rocky Road in front of the TV instead of taking an after-dinner walk. But why is it so difficult to cultivate good new patterns and break bad old ones? "Humans were designed to habituate," says Roger Walsh, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California, Irvine. "Our brains are wired that way." It's habitual behaviors like eating and sleeping, after all, that keep humans surviving as a species.

While these two behaviors are instinctual, most of our habits are learned, often in childhood and from repetition. It's been said that a habit is like a sheet of paper: Once it has been creased, it tends to fall into the same fold. But even if your habits are as plentiful as folds in a triple A map, you can learn new ones.