What’s the most commonly broken New Year’s resolution? You guessed it ÔÇô LOSE WEIGHT. You start out with the best intentions, but along the way, something always goes wrong…

After emerging, bulging and gassy, from the egg-nog-spiked holiday season, with a veritable cheese ball lodged in your ever-expanding gut, you decide, enough is enough. You resolve to lose that 10 pounds ONCE AND FOR ALL. And this time, you’re going to do it right.

BEST LAID PLANS

At first, your new regimen feels almost pleasurable. As the scale’s needle begins to drop, you start bragging to fellow milspouses about how many veggies you’ve been eating and the new classes you’ve tried at the base gym.

Everything is looking up, until you glance at the calendar. You made it through the playoffs without so much as a drop of queso passing your lips, but the Super Bowl is coming. Eating a salad on Super Bowl Sunday would be nothing short of sacrilege, and besides, you’ve learned how to eat sensible portions, right?

The morning after the Super Bowl, your stomach is still sloshing with a mixture of half-chewed chicken wings, chili, sausage dip, beer, and about four thousand Peanut M&Ms. Guilt and self-loathing send you into a week-long tailspin of binge eating.

One night, while polishing off a can of Pringles, you notice that the calendar on the refrigerator indicates that Lent is coming. Religion aside, you realize that this is your lifeline to get back on track, and make a promise to give up junk food until Easter.

Aside from sneaking a few morsels from the heart-shaped box of chocolates your husband sent you for Valentine’s Day, you keep to your promise and begin to envision yourself looking trim when he comes home from deployment.

Just when you think one of your rolls has disappeared, Easter creeps up on you. How can you stay on track when you’re surrounded by pastel miniatures of every candy you’ve ever loved? It’s entrapment!

Feeling guilty about the plateful of ham and scalloped potatoes you had for Easter dinner, you give up and shamelessly pilfer candy from your kids’ baskets after they’ve gone to bed. The sugar coma drags you down to rock bottom again, until the calendar offers the next lifeline to climb back out of the abyss.

AND SO IT GOES….

This yo-yo diet cycle continues throughout the year, bottoming out through the guacamole of Cinco de Mayo, the ice cream of Independence Day, the potato salad of Labor Day, the candy extravaganza of Halloween, the gravy-smothered Thanksgiving, and the seasonal smorgasbord of the winter holidays.

Before you know it, it’s the New Year, and you’ve got another cheese ball lodged in your gut.

Are we too weak to overcome our calendars? As long as peanut butter cups come in heart, egg, pumpkin, and tree shapes, are we doomed to fail? Should we just resign ourselves to muffin tops and lunch lady arms for the rest of our lives?

No! The fit people I know enjoy a big slice of wedding cake, or wings on game day, and don’t give it another thought. But when many of us indulge, we plunge into a crevasse of guilt that is too hard to climb out of.

So then, the key to preventing the calendar from sabotaging our weight and fitness goals is to banish guilt forever! Don’t hate yourself for breaking your resolutions. It’s OK to fall off the wagon every once in a while, because you’re in the driver’s seat.

Just climb right back on, stay on course, and resolve to never look back.

4 Milspouse Diet tips that actually work!

• There are no forbidden fruits. Unless you have a food-related health condition such as diabetes or celiac disease, don’t think of any foods as off limits, because you’re setting yourself up for guilt if you violate your self-imposed prohibitions.

• Concentrate on eating healthily, not on eating less. Keeping track of fruits, veggies, water and protein will keep you from obsessing about too many carbs or calories.

• Cut yourself a break with that slice of cake. Know ahead of time that you’ll indulge on special occasions like birthdays, weddings, holidays and homecomings. Enjoy yourself and don’t think about it too much.

• Sidestep the splurge. Just because you had a little ice cream, doesn’t mean you should eat the whole pint. Skipping exercise one day doesn’t justify the couch potato Olympics the rest of the week. Don’t get sucked into the binge mentality ÔÇô keep moving forward!

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