New Year's resolutions – and how to stick to them

Trick no. 1: Set clear goals.

It's hard to motivate yourself to become more physically active if you don't have any goals in mind. However, if you decide to complete a half marathon in August, it's another matter entirely: Every run becomes a training session – and your meals become the building blocks of your sporting success.

Regardless of whether we want to lose or gain weight, we can only make sustainable changes to our body weight through a combination of exercise and nutrition. Hitzberger dishes have been developed on the basis of nutritional and physiological knowledge. They provide the body with all of the important nutrients and offer a balanced diet of proteins, carbohydrates and healthy fats and oils. This provides you with the energy to make great sporting achievements, while at the same time ensuring a pleasant sensation of feeling full without feeling heavy.

Additional tip: Hitzberger dishes with a high protein content are labelled with the symbol of an arm with flexed biceps.

Trick no. 2: Replace treats – but don't remove them from your diet completely.

Fast food usually contains large amounts of sugar and fat, and very little else that's good for us. Nevertheless, we wouldn't last long if we decided to suddenly cut it out completely and only ate salad. A more promising approach is to avoid unhealthy ingredients, while continuing to treat yourself.

Hitzberger offers an alternative to standard fast food. Chips and hamburgers only satisfy our hunger for a short time and tend to contain too many calories. Top chef Eduard Hitzberger set himself the task of reinventing fast food. He starts by using natural, regionally produced ingredients and avoiding preservatives as far as possible. His delicious recipes then create unbeatable taste experiences.

This results in balanced dishes that ensure you consume several portions of fruit and vegetables every day. Products such as wraps, poke bowls, salads and smoothies each contain a large amount of fruit and vegetables, while seeds, nuts and vegetable oils provide healthy fats. Food still ends up on your table quickly, but it's a treat that is healthy nonetheless.

Trick no. 3: Simple rules rather than 100 decisions

One sensible resolution is to reduce your meat intake a little. That's not just good for our body, but also good for the environment. But how can you integrate that into your daily life if you don't fancy cutting meat out altogether? The best way is to set one or more days a week as being meat-free days. This way, you don't have to make this decision on a day-by-day basis, but simply stick to the rule you have set.

You needn't even do without the taste of meat either, because since 2020 Hitzberger has been offering delicious wraps and salads containing planted.chicken. This is a food developed in Switzerland and made from pea protein, pea fibres and rapeseed oil. In terms of both texture and taste, it comes remarkably close to chicken. It also provides nearly as much protein. Planted.chicken is also good for the environment: its manufacture generates only one-third as much greenhouse gases as traditional meat production.

Additional tip: All Hitzberger vegan and vegetarian products are easy to recognise by their label: "V" stands for "vegetarian," while "V+" indicates it is suitable for vegans.

Trick no. 4: Trust your body

Whether it's cookies, Christmas sweets or New Year's Eve champagne, a great deal of what we consume over the festive season is not exactly healthy. So it's high time to get rid of that excess ballast in the weeks after the holiday season. Our body is perfectly able to do so by itself. All we need do is to stop consuming unhealthy things like nicotine, alcohol and foods that are too rich in fat or sugar.

Freshly-made smoothies combining fruit, vegetables and herbs help relieve the pressure placed on our digestive system by the festive excess. Thanks to their thick consistency, you quickly feel full. You can therefore even integrate them into your daily routine to replace an entire meal. What's more, smoothies provide us with vitamins and micronutrients and contain ingredients such as lemon juice, which boost our metabolism.