A new year is a clean slate. It’s a chance to close the door on the mistakes and poor choices of the past 12 months and say this year, these 12 months, will be better.

January 1 also comes at the end of a period of enthusiastic socialising – which, in Australia, generally means enthusiastic drinking.

End-of-year drinks, office drinks, drinks with family, drinks with friends … by the time they roll out of bed on January 1 with a thumping headache and a dull feeling of nausea, there are plenty of people who feel compelled to promise to themselves that they can and will do better.

So they say they will give up drinking, swear off smoking, exercise more, stress less, get off the couch, get off the computer, learn an instrument and add a second language to their linguistic portfolio.

It’s all laudable – and generally lasts until mid-January.

Because as anyone who has ever tried to make a drastic change to their lifestyle would know, it’s not the first few days that are critical, but all the days after that.

It’s the eighth day, when the early momentum has petered out, or the 15^th day, when the commitment is starting to feel like a straitjacket, or the 25^th day, when everyone else has gone back to their old bad habits and you wonder why you don’t just do the same.

Those are the days that are difficult.

But that doesn’t mean a commitment to changing for the better isn’t worth doing, it just means it is worth doing well.

Australians are, for whatever reason – and our more sedentary lifestyles must surely be one of the biggest culprits – suffering more health problems because of obesity than ever before.

We live in a country of abundant sunshine and incredible space, we deify our sportsmen and women, yet we can’t, as a nation, seem to get our weight under control.

We are, on the whole, much more unhealthy than we should be. We need to do more exercise and improve our diet.

These are problems that won’t be fixed by the end of January, or February. But they are problems that can be lessened by the end of January – even if only by a small amount.

January 1 has come and gone, but there’s no rule to say resolutions can’t start on January 6.