It’s the New Year and when you make your resolution to lose weight, will it simply be wishful thinking?

Remember, there is a psychological side to dieting and weight loss. It is the side that has the most power to bring about weight-loss success. Losing the weight is never just about food. Any woman with a weight problem knows this in her heart of hearts. Being a success at losing weight requires much more than a food plan. What matters most is preparation, thought, planning and commitment to making personal changes that last.

The old formula, diet + exercise = weight loss is clearly not working for many women. On any given day 45% of women are dieting and yet, 62% of women from the ages 20 to 74 are still overweight. Many people say that diets don’t work. However, more often than not, it is the woman herself who can’t work the diet very well. Why do so many women fail at losing weight? It is because their firmly established habits and usual ways of thinking and feeling are still operating. You can’t drag along your old ways of doing things and expect a new result. If you’ve been a failure at losing weight in the past, and you truly want to succeed, you need to make significant changes.

Losing the weight permanently always means going through a process of personal change. The psychological research on personal change shows that people never accomplish behavioural changes instantly. Giving up a behaviour, such as overeating, means that woman need to self-reflect, plan carefully, create ways to overcome obstacles, learn how to accept slips and still be able to move forward. Doing these things may sound hard, but when a woman sets her mind to it, it’s much easier than trying to diet without making these fundamental changes. So, let’s say you are a woman who really wants to lose weight. And lets say that you want to keep it off for good, instead of a constant losing-gaining cycle. How do you do it?

According to Drs James Prochaska, John Norcross, and Carlo DiClemente, experts in how people change unwanted behaviours, you can’t simply expect yourself to snap into action and be successful. You need to prepare for the actions you will take, and anticipate the challenges these actions will bring. In other words, if you just jump into the next diet plan without getting yourself ready to do it, you will most likely fail.

One of the most important ways to prepare is to set goals. Setting reachable goals for yourself takes you from merely wishing to lose weight to being committed to losing the weight. Research on goal-setting shows that there are different kinds of goals you need to set. Of course, there is the long-term goal: “I want to lose 30 pounds” or “I want to drop a dress size”. But there are also important short-term goals, such as “Tomorrow I will start thinking about which weight-loss diet plan would fit me best” or “This week I will note down three things each day that are interfering with my decision to lose the weight” or “I will research ways that people use to keep up their diet motivation”.

Another important method of preparing yourself to lose weight is to plan. Careful planning for the steps you will take makes goals reachable, whether they are short-term or long-term goals. Dr Peter Gollwitzer of New York University has shown that setting a goal is important, but having a plan to implement that goal is essential. Otherwise, the goal remains just an intention, and can’t be put into action. Plans to get to your goal can be written or thought, but they need to have as their basis “If this happens, then I will do that" or “When this obstacle presents itself, I will overcome it by doing such and such”. Plans that include details like these are a clear roadmap to a goal and help people feel much more capable of getting there.

So, first of all, a woman who wants to lose weight needs to be prepared. Then she needs to be able to stick to her weight-loss plan, which calls for ongoing motivation. Exactly how do you keep up your motivation when the weight-loss process takes time? The best way is to establish a series of small goals along the way to the big weight-loss goal. Each small goal achieved is a mini-success. Lots of small successes add up and greatly strengthen motivation and commitment.

Here’s a perfect example of a small goal that has a lot of power: getting right back on your food plan after you fall off. Research by Dr G. Alan Marlatt at the University of Washington shows that the best way to recover from a lapse in behaviour is to think of it as caused by something outside yourself. Dr Marlatt cautions that if your attitude toward a cheat is that it’s due to some unfixable personality characteristic, it will be much harder to face it and move on. You might say to yourself, “See, I knew I didn’t have it in me” or “I’m much too unreliable”, or “I’m a total failure". However, if you attribute the cause of the cheat to the situation you were in at the time, you can forgive yourself much more easily. The result is that you can figure out what went wrong in the situation so it won’t happen again. Then you are very likely to get right back to your regimen.

One of the most serious problems women have with regard to weight control is that they don’t know how to keep the weight off once they’ve lost it. Gaining weight back can be heartbreaking for a woman who has achieved a hard-won weight loss. But you can work on how to make such an important change stay in place. The research figures show that only about twenty percent of people who lose weight will actually keep it off. That means that eighty percent of people who reach a weight-loss goal will not be able to maintain the weight loss. It is all too common for people to regain the weight they’ve lost, and sometimes gain back even more than they’ve lost.

The central theme of weight-loss maintenance: there is still work to be done. It’s not simply over because you got to that magic number on the scale. You need to keep up with all the behavioural-change aids and supports you used during the active losing stage. You need to keep investigating your habits, your thoughts, and your feelings. You need to stay aware of your environment. You still need to enlist support from significant people around you. You need to keep in mind that lapses are a natural part of life from which you can move on. Maintaining your weight, is a process, just like losing weight. Losing weight permanently is very achievable. But just going on another diet won’t do the trick. Don’t do it the hard way, by constantly having to fight against yourself. Pave the way by preparing, planning, trying things out, learning as you go, and allowing for whatever time it takes to make real personal change. That’s the way to make losing weight and keeping it off much easier.

This year put some teeth into your New Year's resolution. Discard the old formula: weight loss = dieting + exercise. The new formula: weight loss = psyching your diet to make lasting personal change (with a dash of good dieting thrown in).