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By Sara Altshul

I’m not big on making resolutions; I know myself too well. Usually the promises I make to myself New Year’s Eve I’ve broken weeks before Valentine’s Day rolls around, so why bother with list-making when there are movies to watch and leftovers to eat?

I feel a little different this year. I’m older and wiser and time is no longer on my side. If I continue to take the let-me-eat-cake approach to my diet, and use the it’s-too-cold-for-my-walk-today excuse (it’s been cold for weeks now) it won’t just be my dress size that’ll enlarge. My cholesterol, my blood sugar, and blood pressure have nowhere to go but up (they’ve been edging in the wrong direction lately) and that will inevitably sentence me to living fewer, less robust years.

So I will make just five simple, concrete, easy-to-keep resolutions this year. I’ll use this space from time to time as a reality check and I’ll let you know how I’m doing. Here goes:

1. No more second helpings

Of anything except veggies, that is. Period.

2. Exercise over excuses

If it’s too nasty outside to take my 45-minute walk, I’ll turn on the TV and find a cable exercise show and follow along. If there’s nothing on cable, I’ll turn on some music and dance for as long as I can.

3. Take my vitamins

Specifically, I will take a whole-food based multivitamin every day and 2,000 I.U. of vitamin D. The “sunshine vitamin,” as D is sometimes called, is a proven immune enhancer. In fact, I have to wonder if the bad case of bronchitis that sidelined me the week before Christmas was directly related to my having run out of vitamin D a month or so earlier. I like whole-food based, organic vitamins from New Chapter, Country Life, and Enzymatic Therapy, Inc. All three lines are widely available at natural food stores and online.

4. Carve out 15 minutes for quiet “me” time

I paid good money for an 8-week transcendental meditation course a few years ago, and received my own mantra, which I magically still remember. For a while, I did manage two 15-minute sessions a day (really, it’s easy—just sit, comfortably, mutter a meaningless word over and over, and instead of focusing on your thoughts, focus on your breath as it goes in and out) but after a while, I lost the habit. I’m going to try taking it up again because I know it’ll be helpful in keeping my blood pressure down and my spirits up.

5. Be the happy one—because happiness is catching.

James Fowler, PhD, associate professor, University of California, San Diego and Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, a professor at Harvard Medical School, analyzed data from the famous Framingham Heart Study and recreated a social network of almost 5,000 people whose happiness was measured from 1983 to 2003. Here’s their discovery: every happy friend you have boosts your chances of being happy by 9%. Degrees of separation matter: You’re 10% more likely to be happy if you’re the friend of a friend of a happy person and 6% more likely to be happy when you’re three friends removed from a jolly soul.

Even faking a smile counts. “Customer service reps who smile get better quality ratings, even though their customers can’t see them,” says Fowler. “The act of smiling causes them to alter their own mood—and that gets transmitted over the telephone. So I think small efforts to be happy and positive can have big payoffs, not just for our friends and loved ones, but for their friends, and their friends’ friends as well,” adds Fowler.

Hear, hear. I resolve to be happy in 2009—even if I have to fake it.

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