Breaking your New Year’s resolution has become a running joke, but this year you don’t need to be the punchline.

New Year’s resolutions are sort of like imaginary friends: they’re easy to make but kind of hard to keep around. This is especially true for resolutions involving weight loss and dieting — a resolution topic all of us have probably considered while wolfing down grandma’s Christmas pie.

At the start of 2011, a Barna Group study reported that 90 million Americans made New Year’s resolutions, 30 percent of which were related to weight and dieting. However, of their previous year’s resolutions, approximately half of them weren’t successful.

Want to free yourself from your annual resolution-breaking cycle and achieve your diet goals? It’s possible, experts say.

Stay real

“The biggest advice I would give is to set realistic goals,” says nutritionist Jennifer Adler, co-founder of the International Easting Disorders Institute and owner of Passionate Nutrition. “People end up being very black-and-white and set unrealistic expectations that are unachievable.”

Identify what you want your end result to be. Maybe you want to achieve a healthier weight, which could mean gaining weight or losing weight. Perhaps you want to build muscle bulk, or reduce the amount of saturated fat you consume. Whatever your ideal end result, choose an aspect of that and create a goal that will push you slightly beyond your comfort level while still being realistic. For example, someone who wants to be vegan could start by designating just three days a week as meat-free days.

“If someone is working out one time per week,” says Adler, “[setting a goal of] seven times a week is not the best goal; three times a week might be more realistic goal.”

Journal your food

It’s easy to underestimate the amount of calories you consume or drink throughout the day. A 2011 study conducted by a Harvard Medical School researcher found that 80 percent of young adults underestimate the calories in their meals, and 30 percent underestimated by 500 or more calories. To put that into perspective, eating 500 extra calories a day can lead to a weight gain of one pound per week!

Tracking what you eat throughout the day can prevent such underestimation. “Food journaling helps you keep detailed track of what you are eating,” says lifestyle dietitian Mary Barbour, who has been featured on HGTV’s international House Hunters and FOX’s Hell’s Kitchen. “It makes you think twice before popping that handful of M&Ms into your mouth because you’ll have to write it down.”

If you prefer electronic journals to the more traditional paper form, several apps and websites, such as MyFitnessPal and Calorie Counter, track and count calories for thousands of common food items.

Stay motivated

Meeting your New Year’s resolutions is just as much a head game as it is a health game. Many people find themselves throwing their hands up in despair because their resolution feels like punishment or restriction, and that makes it hard to persevere and stay strong.

Instead, reward yourself when you do well — as long as those rewards don’t involve something that breaks your resolution. For example, you could reward yourself with a spa massage after a month of meeting your gym workout resolution.

“I recommend keeping track of success and giving rewards for X  number of times of meeting your goal,” says Addler.

Or, try pairing up with a friend who has similar health goals. “Competition sometimes brings out the best in people and is a huge motivator,” says Barbour. “Plus, even if you lose — no pun intended — you still win!”

Running is as much about eating the right foods as it is about pulling on the right pair of shoes and choosing the right running route. Knowing what to eat and when to eat it can give you that run-enhancing boost you need to defeat a bad case of the Mondays — or Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays…

1. Watch the clock. Avoid eating large meals four hours or less before running. Also avoid eating high fiber, high fat, high protein or spicy foods. Such foods can create stress in your digestive system and make running — or any kind of intense physical activity, for that matter…swimming, sex, shuffleboard with grandma — difficult.

2. Carbo-load…correctly. Everyone knows that carbohydrates replenish glycogen stores in your muscles, giving you the fuel you need when exercising. But many people do it wrong, and I know several people who actually eat chocolate candy bars before their run because they think it’s “healthy.” While a Snickers bar might work for Betty White, it won’t work for you. Start carbo-loading 72 hours before your run, and aim to eat four grams of carbohydrates for every pound that you weigh.

3. Fuel up in the middle of your workout. Typically, you’ll need to eat 60 grams of carbohydrates and hour before you run for runs that last up to two hours. For anything longer than that, you’ll need to refuel during your run so you can  complete your workout as strong as you started it. Try an energy gel or energy chew. You can also make your own portable, natural energy drink by swirling 24 ounces of filtered water with a teaspoon of lime juice, two teaspoons of honey, eight teaspoons of cane sugar and 1/3 teaspoon of sea salt.

4. Chow on recovery foods. Many people focus on how they eat before they train and pay no attention to their recovery meal. This post-workout meal is critical because it can improve your fitness returns, battle fatigue and pain, and speed up total recovery time. The less time you need for recovery, the more time you can spend pounding the pavement. Try a protein- and carb-rich meal that’s alkaline-promoting, such as a hemp protein shake. Or, have some lean protein like a chicken breast. Whatever you choose, try to chow it down within 60 minutes of completing your run.

LindaJoy Rose, Ph.D., pioneered the raw fusion cooking method and is the author of Raw Fusion: Better Living Through Living Foods. To celebrate the start of 2012, we chatted with her to discover the insights, lessons and advice she’d learned in 2011.

2011 was a year of explosive growth, awakening, accountability and appreciation for all of the blessings in my life.

While there are still far too many individuals who remain uninformed and unconcerned about these issues, more and more people are opening their eyes to the fact that what they eat or do not eat is going to have an impact on their health, longevity, attitude and appearance.

To make 2012 your best year ever, assess your life from a holistic perspective — if you are not giving attention to a certain aspect of Self, there is going to be a backlash. For example, for many years I had been into spiritual pursuits, like meditation and expanding my mind through research, but neglected the physical. You can’t find that internal balance without eventually giving equal attention to all of the aspects of Self.

Health is high-functioning and feeling a certain vibrancy and glow flowing through your body. This would also be evident to other people as you would exude this energy.

Find a way to eliminate eating processed foods and fast foods as much as possible. From the research I’ve been doing, these foods are engineered to make them irresistible and super-palatable, exciting the hotspot centers of the brain without offering anything back in the way of nutritional support. I believe that the anti-nutrients and artificial flavorings and chemicals in these meals repress a lot of our life force energy and contribute to the development of disease.

But every once in a while, nothing is going to hit the spot like a bag of Cheetos. I have them and then don’t think about them again for awhile. Indulgences are important occasionally, otherwise the subconscious mind takes over and we lose our motivation.

In 2011, I made a point of including leafy greens in almost every meal. I eat a lot of raw foods, but I also pioneered the raw fusion method, which blends raw and cooked foods in very exciting ways. When I flash-saute some veggies in coconut oil with garlic and other spices (one of my favorite combinations is organic corn, shitake mushrooms and asparagus) and serve them over a bed of greens (spinach, arugula, butter lettuce and a spring mix), it makes for quite a tantalizing variety of flavors, temperatures and textures. Lots of nutritional yeast to top it off!

I never get tired of seeing people’s reactions to how utterly delicious this lifestyle can be. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, said “It is easier to change a person’s religion than the way they eat.” That’s quite a statement. Our eating patterns are so deeply ingrained and that’s why it’s so hard for people to change. Mainly, people fear change and feeling deprived; I love showing them that they can change and actually enjoy the food.

I have finally locked in the habit of meditating virtually every day for no less than 20 minutes — that’s a big one as I’ve studied meditation in dozens of different formats for almost 30 years and was never able to get the discipline down.

I used to define happiness with being exuberant and excited about outer circumstances, but in 2011 it really became more about being centered, at peace with myself and not at the mercy of external stuff.