New year’s resolutions generally have success rates so poor they’re about on par with Hollywood marriages.

Yet this year The Border Mail’s experimental pledgers have, somehow, managed to buck the trend.

What's your new year's resolution? Leave a comment below!

Six out of seven residents interviewed this time last year have achieved their 2012 goals in full or in part.

Some were successful because they grew resolutions into habit, others set small and achievable objectives.

Beechworth’s Lisa Cartledge and Wodonga’s Julie Banks promised not to take one sip of alcohol in February.

The pair stayed off the booze for the whole month, leaving them to indulge for the rest of the year.

Those with more revolutionary plans, however, found life often got in the way.

Lavington grandmother Jane Byrne, 62, had resolved to go swimming regularly after a knee replacement.

But she encountered a setback after complications and put on 15 kilograms.

But, because she had already started to makeover her lifestyle, she was able to peg back all the weight she gained in 

the second half of the year.

“I used to be lazy,” she said.

“If I couldn’t get a car park in front of the shops I used to drive around and around until I find one.

“Losing weight is an ongoing thing for me. I’m the type of person who only has to look at a cream cake and I’ll put it on.”

The pledge of Wodonga supermarket worker Barb McDonald was to become healthier.

She was able to stick to some of the ideas but not all of them.

She quit going to the gym, just as gym manager Andrew Mundy predicted would be the trend, but she did make one very important lifestyle change.

After falling sick in January, she gave away drinking coke after tests came back that she was OK — as a result, she lost three kilograms.

It was an addiction the 58-year-old lived with since she was a teenager.

“I just went cold turkey on coke,” Ms McDonald said.

“There’s still time that I think gosh I would like a coke, but I made a promise to myself.”

This year the grandmother has decided to set a more specific fitness goals, vowing to go 

walking three times a week.

Meanwhile Ms Byrne is changing themes all together, aiming to laugh more in the year to come.

“My daughter-in-law has a quote that says you don’t stop laughing because you get old, you get old because you stop laughing,” she said.