Redefining New Year’s resolutions after 50

Podcast transcript

INTRO
Welcome to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. Over the next half hour, Docs in a Pod will educate you about the health and wellness of adults everywhere. Co-host Dr. Rajay Seudath and Carmenn Miles will share information to improve your health and well-being. And now here are Carmenn Miles and Dr. Rajay Seudath.

CARMENN MILES
Hello and thank you so much for joining us today on the award winning Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. Happy New Year, everyone. I'm Carmenn Miles, and I'm absolutely honored to join in on some great conversations as your new Docs in a Pod co-host alongside amazing veteran co-hosts Dr. Rajay Seudath and Dr. Tamika Perry. Each week we'll discuss a wide range of health and wellness topics, especially those that impact our seniors. Our goal is to share practical information on how we can all live healthier, happier lives and to better manage chronic conditions. We're super excited to have you listening in today, so thank you for joining us. Our co-host today is Dr. Rajay Seudath. He's absolutely no stranger to Docs in a Pod. Dr. Seudath is a board certified family medicine physician. He's a Tampa native and currently lead physician at the University location for Optum. Dr. Seudath is enthusiastic about primary care. Keeping health literacy in the forefront, he's always guiding his patients to meet their health care goals. He's passionate about teaching and that's really one of the reasons we love having him as our co-host on the show. Dr. Seudath, I have filled in as co-host before on Docs in a Pod but have not yet had the opportunity to sit at the table with you. So, I'm really excited about our conversation today. But before we get started, do you have any tips for me as the newbie to the Docs in a Pod crew?

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
No, I think you're going to be just fine. Docs in a Pod is so much fun to do. I think we all really enjoy coming together and bringing this information for our listeners and for patients all around the world who are listening. So, I am very excited for 2026, and I think we're going to have a great time Carmenn.

CARMENN MILES
Yeah, I think so, too. I think I'm in great hands. Well, here we are already smack dab in the middle of January 2026. This new year is off and running with or without us, and fast approaching is what many refer to as Quitters Day. Have you heard of Quitters Day? Are you familiar with that reference at all?

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
No, I'm not as familiar with Quitters Day. I'm thinking this has to do with the New Year's resolutions, which is what today's show is all about. So, tell me about Quitters Day.

CARMENN MILES
Here's the shocking reality. Quitters Day, which is actually January 17th to be exact, is the day that apparently many of us abandon our resolutions for the new year. Just 17 days into the new year, and most of us are already ready to throw in the towel on resolutions. It's also said that by February, 80% of resolutions are distant memories and less than 10% of us stick with our resolutions long term. So, some pretty dismal statistics there. I thought now would be a great time to chat about resolutions and how we can adjust our mindset and actually stick to some of our goals, especially when it comes to our health. Dr. Seudath, I'm curious, are you the kind of person who reflects and sets goals at the beginning of the year? Do you have conversations with your patients about establishing health goals in the new year?

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Yes. I really try to set the tone of the new year with that first visit of the year. We usually spend a little more time with our patients in our practice. What we're trying to do is find out what they want to do. What are your health care goals for 2026? You'll find that many people have different types of goals. Understanding their motivation for that goal can be one of the things that allows them to keep to it. If someone says, well, I just want to lose some weight. Well, why? Well, everybody else around me is losing weight. I think that's a good reason. As opposed to, I want to lose some weight because my best friend had a heart attack, and I think losing weight can help my blood pressure and reduce my cholesterol and reduce my risks for getting a heart attack. So, those are two different motivations for going into goals. So, I think that's one of the first things to do to get goals to stick is associating it with a very tangible, distinct motivation for that goal. I think that's one of the things. If a patient comes to me and they want to do something, sometimes just talking about it and finding more reasons to stick to that goal can actually improve their chances of meeting that goal. There's a lot of different frameworks, a lot of different ways that you can set goals, log them, make yourself accountable. I think of those ones, there's one called the SMART tool, which is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. If you can fill those in for your goal, that makes it far easier for you to go into them and go over that. We can go within to that in depth.

CARMENN MILES
For sure. Let's just take a moment to welcome those who may have just joined us. You're listening to the award winning Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. I'm Carmenn Miles. Our podcasts are available wherever you listen to your podcasts. We're also available on the radio in several Texas markets and in Florida. We're talking with our co-host, Dr. Rajay Seudath, about redefining New Year's resolutions and how to set sustainable goals that we can actually stick to. I love what you're saying, Dr. Seudath, about tying those resolutions and those goals to intention instead of rigid, regimented resolutions. Resolutions should be about creating healthy habits and not so much about being perfect, right? Because life happens and sometimes when we don't meet the mark, we feel like we failed in some way, and that's kind of when the quitting starts to sink in. There's also the other side of that coin to consider. Maybe it's not that our resolutions are so rigid, but they can be too vague, and lack of solid plan. You can say, for example, I want to read more in 2026. But to make it abundantly clear and plain about your goals, you want to say, I want to read 12 books.I will read 12 books in this new year. One book a month. So, there's two sides to that coin. You started out talking about if you if you have someone who maybe wasn't or did not put health or as a priority in 2025, but they want to make a change in 2026. What would be their first step? You mentioned something about that initial exam or wellness visit. Can we revisit that?

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
In our practice, your wellness visit I like to do them in your birth month. So, if you're born in May, we usually have your annual wellness visit in May. But your first visit of the year, whether it's an annual visit or not, you can actually kind of set the tone of what do I want to do? It's almost like a year in review, that first visit of the year. We're kind of going over all your diseases. The way Medicare works, it's kind of like we want to make sure we cover all those things that we're not missing anything. For instance, was your diabetes doing well in 2025 or was it not so well at the end of the year? Is your blood pressure not being controlled or was it very controlled? So, when it comes to New Year's resolutions, if we're talking about health, well, let's be a little more specific, because that can be a lot of different subjects. For instance, do I want to work on preventative health? Do I want to work on specific diseases that I have? Do I want to work on exercise for my entire wellbeing? Do I want to work on weight loss? I want to look better in my swimsuit. Do I want to work on cutting down on things that are bad for me? Smoking, drinking, substance abuse problems. Do I want to work on my mental health? Should I look into therapy or counseling? When we talk about therapy or counseling, is it for my job, for my relationships, for bereavement? Am I looking just to reduce stress? Again, there's also mental health for specific mental health disease. Do I want to get my depression under control? Do I want to get my anxiety under control? So, all these things are different subjects in which we can start a New Year's resolution. But regardless of the subject or the area in which we're going to make a New Year's resolution that we had talked about previously was the SMART format. So again, specific measurable, achievable, relevant, time bound. Specific. Give me something specific. What can we nail down? What can we say specifically we want to do? I'm drinking a 12 pack every day. Doc, I have to stop this. I am slowly killing myself and I can feel it. Okay. Alcohol is not something that we want to just cold turkey. So, let's get to a specific number. How about two per night? Is that doable? Measurable. Can you measure how much you're drinking every night? Yeah, absolutely. You could write that down. Is it achievable? It certainly is. It's achievable. It may be difficult. If we run into barriers we could start medicine like Antabuse. So, if a person has more than two drinks, they get sick. Is it relevant? Does it align with this person's broader objectives? Is this what you want to have in your life? That goes back to what we were talking about motivations. What is the motivation for this? Man, Doc, I feel like if I don't stop drinking, I'm not going to see my daughter graduate or I'm not going to see my son. I'm not going to be able to walk my daughter down the aisle for her wedding. So, making it relevant and then time bound. The T in that SMART format. Time bound. We have to set a limit. Again, that may be that we want to make it a reasonable amount of time for the type of goal you're setting. So, let's say I want to lose weight. I want to lose 50 pounds in two weeks. That's not a reasonable amount of time. That's not a that's not a healthy amount of time either. So, making these health care resolutions with your health care provider can absolutely make these more achievable. I think those are some of the things that are really important when you're talking to your provider. That's kind of the format I typically use with my patients. I like to have them come back on regular intervals to see how they are doing with those. One of the other things that I don't necessarily think that study, when they were talking about Quitters Day and things like that, did they look at support? Family support or partner support. What is your support system that is allowing you to meet those goals, to meet your New Year's resolutions? If you make a goal that you're going to eat less meat and you're going to go vegan three days a week. Monday, Wednesday Friday is vegan day. If they're making chicken piccata or they're making short ribs and that's all you got to eat in the house, that's going to be kind of difficult for you to keep that. That temptation is there. So, sometimes having the rest of your family supporting your goal, that's one of the things that can make that goal much more achievable. I think that's important to get more people in on it and have other brains to keep what you're supposed to be doing it that also keeps you accountable as well. If they see that you're having six beers, but you should all be having two, they might start to nag you. But that nagging can help you to keep on your goal.

CARMENN MILES
That's absolutely right. Don't go away as we, myself and Dr. Seudath, continue to discuss, resolutions and your health going into 2026. You're listening to Doc's in a pod presented by WellMed.

AD
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CARMENN MILES
Welcome back. We are discussing New Year's resolutions as it pertains to our health. I loved what you said, Dr. Seudath, about maybe scheduling an appointment with your doctor in January and doing the whole year in review thing. Going over the prior year and setting new goals for the new year, all of which we want to fall into that SMART acronym. Tell us what smart means again.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Sure. The SMART format is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. Like we said, whatever the subject of your New Year's resolution, you can put it within that format. Going back to those different subjects, like preventative health. I want to do the things that are going to keep me healthy. What are the things that could be in my future that I can catch early? For women that's going to be mammograms. That's going to be things like colonoscopies. That's going to be a DEXA scan to look to see how hard your bones are. So, if you're making a New Year's resolution that you want to be healthier in general, then preventative care is one of those things that maybe before you weren't trying to do those things. Maybe your doctor said, hey, you need to go get your mammogram. It's been two years, and you're kind of hesitant. They're uncomfortable. Nobody in my family has breast cancer. I really don't want to do that. But if you're making a New Year's resolution to improve your health, that's one of the facets that we can definitely take advantage of. Then talking about your health in general, exercise. Exercise has so many health benefits. Making time for exercise is an excellent New Year's resolution. One of the most recent studies I was looking at, it was talking about dementia and memory and how you can have delayed onset of dementia or even decreased risk for it by having 10,000 steps. Even at 4000 steps a day, people had a reduction in that risk. So, even if it's just walking. But if we're going to talk about exercise in general, I feel that people who are over 65 who are in the senior age, they need a mix of aerobic cardio exercise and strength training. You need to be able to do both of those things. If your goal is I want to prevent falls. I've had a fall. It was very scary. I want to become more balanced, and I want to strengthen my body, starting an exercise regimen could be a great idea. Talking to your provider may give some insight on how to do that. If a person is very debilitated, let's say they were having cancer or they've had other diseases that prevent them from exercising, maybe we start you at an at home program with home health and physical therapy coming to your home. After they've measured you and evaluate you and given you some exercise to do at home, we graduate to physical therapy at a facility. Then from there, you're doing the exercise on your own at a gym or with a personal trainer or just by yourself. So, that's a good progression of exercise that we can get going on.

CARMENN MILES
We have to. We have to get up and get moving. It's important regarding our health. I'll tell you the mistake that I make you after year before I eventually putter out. I fall in that 80% that that kind of throws in the towel before February. Growing up, I played just about every sport out there except for maybe tennis and soccer. In my 50 plus year old mind, I think I believe that I've still got it. January 1st hits and I go gangbusters as if I'm still that All-American athlete and in record time, I have worn myself out. In some cases, I've injured myself. I did that just a couple weeks ago. I do it to myself every time and I know better. Tell us, Dr. Seudath, what's your recommendation for patients who have resolved to get moving? How do we get started? And how do we stay consistent and not become a statistic, if you will?

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
Absolutely. Staying consistent is scheduling that time. Like you said, oh, man, I went a little gangbuster. I went a little too hard a little too much at once. So, part of that is the achievability of the goal. You don't want to have your goal too lofty. I'm going to do two hours every single day. Maybe you schedule it for 30 minutes. Even then, a person could harm themselves in 30 minutes. Not to say they can't, but scheduling a certain set amount of time or you set a certain number of repetitions, a certain number of sets. So, you kind of let your body guide how much you're going to do. If you say, I'm going to do three sets of 10, but you're at rep number five on the second set, you're like, I really don't feel like I can do anymore. Don't push yourself past that. Maybe you drop weight or maybe you stop at that point, right? So, that's one of the things that coming up with how you are going to meet that goal could be part of the issue. The other thing, when it comes to exercise and getting moving is having a buddy. If you can make the goal with somebody else for exercise and coming together, that was what we were talking about earlier. What's the support system for meeting your goal? Having an exercise buddy or having a group of people you go with, whether it's through church, a social gathering, family members, friends, having someone to go with you will also motivate you to go. It's like, well, Bob's going to be there. I can't let Bob down. If it's just m, itÕs no big deal. But I can't let Bob down. So, that's one of the things that can definitely get us going to keep the exercise. Oftentimes, when we think about exercise, we also think about weight loss. Now, the newest studies show that exercise is only a fraction of when it comes to weight loss. Weight loss is what you put in your body 100%. It's what you eat, what you eat, what you eat, and more importantly, what you don't eat.

CARMENN MILES
What is the saying? You can't out train a bad diet?

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
That's correct. I think when I was learning nutrition and med school, the nutritionist had said, you cannot go and eat a Big Mac and fries and expect to run it off. It's not going to happen. Which is true. One of the ways that we can do that is, again, by getting ourselves to be accountable. One of those things is the exercise apps or the dietary apps. On My Fitness Pal, you can log your calories. So, if we're trying to lose weight and we want to set a goal and we want to meet that goal, we can log our calories. If we're going to be trying to lose weight at a healthy amount, 2,500 calories per day is a good goal. We can try and meet that, and we can plan our diets so that we can stay within that goal. So, those are some of the things that we can do to meet that goal in terms of weight loss. And again, having more support, doing more research, finding more recipes, all of those things are part of what you can do as you're researching your goal. That's also another thing. It's not necessarily on that SMART format, but if you have a goal that you want to meet, you should be getting as much information as you can before you say, okay, today's the day I go on my diet, right? Do some of that preparation beforehand so that you can make that goal more achievable. There's a saying, if all you got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If the only if the only low calorie thing you got to eat is tofu, that's all you get to eat. So, having lower calorie, high nutrient dense foods that you can tolerate and eat, that's one of the things that can help you to meet that goal. So, for any of these types of resolutions, doing some research, doing some information gathering, talking to other people before you start your goal. Even while you're doing your goal, you can look for more information on that. So, those are some of the things that I think are great. Another one I wanted to touch on was mental health because so often people want to improve their mental health as a New Year's resolution. I want to cut down on my stress. I want to be able to manage my time a little better. I want to bring down my depression. I want to get my anxiety under control. All these things are dealing with mental health, and that's a very good goal. Sometimes when your mental health is not being well controlled, it's going to affect your ability to meet the other goals. Some of the things can be journaling. Some of the things can be just writing down your goals. The fact of filling out a SMART sheet and having a goal in itself can help with anxiety. Part of the time when we have anxiety or depression is it feels like there's no direction in our life, and that's why setting these New Year's resolutions can be so powerful. It gives us a bit of direction. So, we can train our thoughts, which can affect how we feel, which can affect what we do. That's a cycle that's called the think, feel, do cycle. In that cycle, you can't change how you feel. You can only change how you think and what you do. So, sometimes writing these New Year's goals down will allow you to change the way you think about what you're going to do and change the way you're going to act on those. What are you going to do? Whether it's health, exercise, weight loss, cutting back on your vices, improving your mental health, all those things can be improved by kind of preparing and taking some time to do that. I think that's one of the things that a lot of people can benefit from when you're making your New Year's resolutions.

CARMENN MILES
Absolutely. I believe preparation and anything that we set out to do is key. Let me just recap and make sure that I got everything here. Set small, attainable goals. Be intentional. Have a plan. Set specific goals. Celebrate. I think it's important to celebrate those small wins along the way rather than focusing on the final goal. Celebrate the small wins along the way and build accountability. Establishing systems. Get a buddy. Include an accountability partner. I think it's important, and I bet you do too, to focus on your progress and not so much on perfection.

DR. RAJAY SEUDATH
That's it. Thank you so much.

CARMENN MILES
All right. Thank you. Until next time. That's all for today's episode of Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. Thank you for joining us as we explore ways to live healthier lives. Don't be a stranger. Subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. Sharing is caring. Share the podcast with your friends and loved ones who might also benefit from these conversations. You can listen to Docs in a Pod wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget, you can also catch us on the radio in several Texas markets as well as Florida. Until next time, stay well!

OUTRO
Executive producer for Docs in a Pod is Dan Calderon. The producer is Cherese Pendleton. Thank you for listening to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed. Be sure and listen next week to Docs in a Pod presented by WellMed.

DISCLAIMER
This transcript is generated using a podcast editing tool; there may be small differences between this transcript and the recorded audio content.

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