MOSES LAKE — It's kind of a winter ritual. The last of the Christmas and New Year goodies are gone, and when the new year starts, it’s going to be The Year. No more – or at least not as many – cheese curls. More salad. And way, way more exercise. The Year to get lean and change the diet.

Time to join the gym, and this year it’s going to stick. It will. There will be regular trips to the gym, even when the weather is bad, even when the weather gets good. And that diet will be stuck to too, no matter what. Yup. This is The Year.

And then it’s seriously cold, and there’s about a foot of ice and it’s dark, and just going home looks awfully attractive. And eventually it does get warm, and it’s light past 5 p.m., and just going home looks even better.

And it turns out there may come a point when one more salad or one more piece of chicken will be one too many.

So what to do? How to keep those resolutions and make this The Year?

As in many other challenges of life, it helps to have friends. “Workout buddies,” said Jeff Dalrymple, manager of Anytime Fitness in Moses Lake. “It’s always easier to join with someone.” Each person pushes the other, he said. “Competition is a good thing. It also keeps us accountable for our actions out of the gym.”

People come into the gym expecting results in a relatively quick time frame, “and that’s where they make the mistake," said Hector Cuello, one of the trainers at South Campus Athletic Club. “Everything is a process.”

Dalrymple cited his own experience as an example of going it alone. He was injured in an accident and gained a lot of weight. He went back to the gym, confident that he could do it himself – but after three months he decided he needed support, he said. He opted for hiring a trainer.

Cuello said he and his clients set a goal – maybe not the final goal – and work toward it. When the goal is reached, it’s time to set a new one, he said, and keep setting a goal until that final one is reached. “There are a lot of steps in that process.”

The first step was the hardest, Dalrymple said. “It was absolutely awful to drag myself through those doors, but it was just as awful to look in the mirror.”

A proper diet is crucial to losing weight – maybe the most crucial factor, Cuello said. Without the right diet, “no matter what you do at the gym, it’s not going to matter.” Diet, he said, is probably about 80 percent of the losing-weight effort.

To lose body fat and gain muscle, the diet needs to be rich in protein, Cuello said. That includes chicken, lean ground beef and green vegetables.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at [email protected].