If you’ve been reading my posts you know I often base my recommendations on the basis of how I earn a living. If I see a pattern which results in injury, I try to recommend ways to prevent them.

Frankly I should be promoting sports, boot camps and extreme strength training programs. They’ve created a huge business for surgeons. They provide patients ripe for the picking! I should promote the decorating of houses for Christmas, because ladder injuries deliver a sweet financial boost just before year end.

What about the number one New Year’s Resolution? How could there be any harm there?

The number one New Year’s Resolution is to lose weight or “get healthy.” It’s also at the top of the list of failed resolutions and the resolution which ends up injuring many of my patients.

My recommendation? Don’t tie “dieting” and exercising together as your way of losing weight. Separate them. The pie hole is certainly the main problem behind weight gain and weight loss. Modify your diet. Almost any diet works! Make the change.

But separate exercising from dieting because all too often, when the two are tied together, and one stops… the other stops as well. We get injured, sometimes doing the exact exercise program we thought would improve our health in the first place. But once we stop the exercise, we often stop the healthy eating. Many of my patients claim that once they couldn’t exercise, they stopped losing weight.

That wouldn’t happen if they hadn’t tied the two together!

Look at exercise as something you do to stay fit, to enjoy the company of others doing the same thing or just to get outdoors and do…

When you use exercise as the main way to lose weight, it becomes necessary to pursue it in an aggressive way. I can tell you for those of us over forty, with known or unknown physical liabilities, this often leads to injuries. Choose exercise that fits your body type, age and abilities. Build up slowly. You can start an aggressive diet on day one, but you shouldn’t start exercising using the same formula.

Above all, separate the two. Otherwise when the diet stops (as it most surely will for 95% of us), then the exercise stops, or vice versa. When the exercise stops for whatever reason–boredom, injury, weather–then the diet often stops too.