Healthy Eats – Food Network Healthy Living Blog: Food Network's Healthy Eats: Healthy Recipes, Weight Loss Tips & Nutrition Information

It’s almost summer — are you ready for beach season? How many of you have kept your January resolutions? Spring is a good time to reevaluate your 2012 health goals and get back on track if you’ve gone off course.

To help everyone get back on track and be fit for summer, we’ve set up a get-healthy challenge for the month of May. This challenge will be similar to our January Challenge, with small, weekly goals that when practiced, can turn into lifetime healthy habits.

How to Get Fit for Summer:

1. Set a reasonable goal: Don’t make the mistake of setting an unattainable goal for yourself (“I”m going to lose 20 pounds by my July vacation!” or “I’ll never eat another carb!”). Instead, think small steps toward better health. Choose a reasonable goal that you can achieve as a building block to better overall health, such as eating more whole grains and fruits and vegetables or trying a new exercise activity. Once you’ve set your goal, decide how you’ll reach it. If you’re trying to eat more vegetables, commit to eating one new veggie each week, or add an extra serving of vegetables to each meal.

2. Get support: Achieving any goal is easier with a support network, either family or friends or a community built around the same goal. Here at Healthy Eats, we saw proof of this with our September Brown-Bag Challenge: bringing lunch every day was easier with the support (and recipe ideas) of everyone who got in involved. So this May, join us again in a Healthy Every Week Challenge.

What is it?

The May Healthy Every Week Challenge is a month of healthy eating, broken down into weekly goals:

Week 1: Eat Breakfast

Week 2: Eat More Whole Grains

Week3: Cook at Home

Week 4: Eat More Fruits and Vegetables

Week 5: Stay On Track

To participate, all you need to do is sign up for our weekly challenge newsletter. You’ll receive the newsletter each Sunday with an outline of that week’s goal, plus plenty of recipes and tips to help you achieve it. We’ll talk about the goals and share recipes and tips for achieving the goal right here on Healthy Eats and on Facebook and Twitter. Since many of our readers write about recipes, cooking and healthy eating tips on their own blogs, we’ve set up a board on Pinterest just for this challenge. When you share your blog posts to our Facebook wall, we’ll pin a selection to our Pinterest board each week.

Are you up for the challenge?