It won’t be long before the New Year’s here and everyone wants to know: How did you do with your New Year’s resolution?

Every New Year’s, well-meaning people make all sorts of resolutions, promises that certain vices will finally be rendered lifeless. One of the most popular resolutions is to lose weight. Yet every year, somehow, weighty resolutions lose the luster that once beamed with promise. Despite successful starts, beer bellies return, lean stomachs turn paunch, six-packs conglomerate into a bulbous, rotund one-pack. “Wait ‘til next year; then I’ll stick to it.”

Though I respect all resolutions, there’s no more worthy resolution than to lose weight. It can literally wind up saving your life, particularly if you’re someone that packs the pounds on around the waistline.

All of us gain and lose weight to varying degrees. Unfortunately, weight gain is rarely evenly distributed; it accumulates in greater amounts in certain regions of the body, be it the face, the thighs, the hips or the buttocks.

For those who put weight on around the hips and waist, that’s worst place possible. Of course excess weight anywhere is a bad thing anyway, but it’s particularly bad around the waist.

Several studies indicate that excess belly fat contain chemicals far different from fat found in other prime fat-gathering areas. The nature of these chemicals is so bad, in fact, that it increases the risk of developing diabetes and heart disease several fold compared to those heavy in the rear, for instance.

But it’s more than just an increased risk of disease that’s cause for concern. People with excessive amounts of visceral fat (i.e. fat found around the stomach) are just plain not as likely to live as long!

Researchers discovered this after analyzing data from approximately 245,000 men and women who participated in the National Institutes of Health-American Association of Retired Persons study (age span: 51-72). The study included a variety of statistics, including the men and women’s weight levels and waist size and whether or not they had died since the study began.

What the researchers found was that among those men and women considered to be obese (where waists were larger than 35 inches for women and larger than 40 inches for men) were about 20 percent more likely to have died in the intervening time period than those with smaller waists (after about nine years).

Now, this finding might not seem too surprising. After all, we’ve been told by years by everyone and their brother that excess fat increases the risk of disease and, ultimately, death. But what makes this study different from the others is the finding that the increased risk for early death was independent of weight. That’s because many of the participants with large waistlines yet died during the study didn’t fit the textbook definition of obese (a BMI over 30). It lead one of the studies head researchers to conclude that one shouldn’t only consider weight levels when trying to lose weight, but where that weight is being put on.

This means that anyone who tends to carry weight in the stomach has to be extra vigilant about staying lean. While this might be construed as a rotten egg of a deal for the potbellied among us (and I use “potbellied” only to describe, not to deride) I view it as a more of a match – a match that when struck provides light to resolutions when they lose their luster.

Avoiding a shorter lifespan – I can’t think of a more motivating incentive than that.