By Nury Vittachi *
It's January, and that means it's time for you and me to make our New Year resolutions.
Now I read every newspaper in the world (or at least it feels like it) and I've noticed that practically every community in the world makes the EXACT SAME resolutions.
In fact, I would wager that your Top Five list is more or less identical to mine, which is as follows.
1) Lose weight;
2) Spend less;
3) Exercise more;
4) Spring-clean; and
5) Find new places to store the corpses of people who upset me.
Am I right?
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Yet despite their predictability, statistics say the vast majority of us fail to keep our resolutions.
So you can imagine how intrigued I was when one of my workmates found a magazine article entitled: "Three Fail-Safe Rules for Keeping Your New Year Resolutions".
She cut them out and pinned them over her desk.
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Rule Number One was: "Don't be too hard on yourself. Tell yourself IT'S OKAY TO FAIL."
This she found very comforting. At lunch, she told me: "This is the first day of my diet, so I should really skip dessert, but on the other hand, IT'S OKAY TO FAIL, so I think I'll have two."
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Rule Number Two was: "Reward yourself whenever intermediate goals are met."
This led to her decision after lunch the following day: "This is the second day of my diet and this time I succeeded in skipping dessert. I will have a triple-scoop of Haagen Dazs on the way back to the office as a reward."
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Rule Three was: "Tell all your family, friends and colleagues that you are losing weight so that they can help and encourage you."
This led to the following conversation taking place on the third day:
Me: "Mmm, this chocolate fudge cake is SO yummy."
Her: "I'm going to have one, too. According to experts, it's OKAY TO FAIL."
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I cannot put my finger on exactly why, but my gut says her "fail-safe" system is going to fail.
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Meanwhile, in a newspaper article on keeping New Year resolutions, I read the following: "The key thing is to give yourself an achievable goal." In which case, my goal will be as follows: "In 2009, I will continue to get fatter, but more slowly, or possibly not."
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The only person I ever met who kept his New Year resolutions had a simple, masculine, achievement-orientated system. It could be characterized as: "The Obnoxious Extremes Method".
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He didn't just cut a few calories. He went on a no-food detox diet and told everyone about it all the time. "I have not eaten anything for five days, six hours and 12 minutes. I have not eaten anything for five days, six hours and 13 minutes." And so on.
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He didn't just do a bit of exercise. He became a total gym junkie. He worked out three hours a day and talked endlessly about how many "reps" he did of each exercise.
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He didn't just save a bit of cash here and there. He became an obsessive miser. He saved most of his income, and probably lived off ketchup sachets and slept in his car.
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His method really worked. But unfortunately it made him obnoxious beyond endurance and he lost all his friends.
If you’re nice to me, I'll tell you where I buried his body.
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Tomorrow: a no-hunger diet secret GUARANTEED to turn overweight folk into average ones
