With the first month of the New Year drawing to a close, GrubHub, a leading food-ordering service, tracked takeout orders to determine the typical lifespan of a New Year’s resolution.

The current three-week bump in healthier takeout orders reveals that diners have stuck to 2013 resolutions at least one week longer than the previous two years.

According to GrubHub analysts, the January bump in healthier takeout orders lasted a mere two weeks in 2011 and 2012. However, healthy orders have spiked nationwide by approximately 10 percent in the first three weeks of 2013, with no current signs of a downturn.

While Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles show minimal bumps in healthy orders over the past three weeks, the following cities exhibit significant upticks in 2013 healthy takeout:

• Atlanta: 20–25 percent
• Philadelphia: 10–15 percent
• Boston: 5–10 percent

“While our data backs up the long-speculated hypothesis that New Year’s resolutions tend to be short lived, the overall trend in healthy ordering has grown consistently in the last two years,” says Mike Evans, GrubHub cofounder and COO. “Approximately 85 percent of GrubHub’s more than 17,000 restaurants offer at least one healthy menu item, and we are continuing to work with our restaurants to meet this diner demand.”

Whether it’s your goal to eat more vegetables, reduce refined carbohydrates, or bump up protein intake, GrubHub’s cuisine filters, menu-search capability, and special instructions boxes provide the tools needed to stick to 2013 resolutions:

• Refine results. Utilize GrubHub’s more than 80 cuisine filters to narrow down your references and search for restaurants serving “Low Fat,” “Low Carb,” “Vegetarian,” or “Healthy” menu items.
• Be exact. Know precisely what you are looking for? Type the menu item name, such as “quinoa,” into GrubHub’s "What would you like?" search box. Restaurants offering quinoa will show up in the search results, with matching items identified at the top of the restaurant menu.
• Customize your order. For an added level of control, utilize the special instructions box to clarify preparation instructions. For example, diners can ask the restaurant to put the “dressing on the side” or “hold the mayo.”