New Year's Resolutions Resolve...Nothing!
About a 6 minute read
As we get ready to wind up 2019, I see a lot of posts about planning for the new year. And once again I hear people talking about how much work they’re going to have to do after January 1st to make up for all the overindulgence they’ve had (or plan to have) this month.
“I’ll start dieting again in January.”
“I’ll get back to the gym after the holidays.”
“I better get out my stretchy pants for our family dinner.”
“Next year will be better, I know I’ll get on track then!”
…and so on.
While I understand that there are more temptations at this time of year than usual, the fact remains that you don’t need to plan to overindulge, nor to make up for overindulgence, when you learn how to take care of your body. There are ALWAYS temptations, holidays, special occasions, vacations, celebrations, and other events that give us all the excuses we need to keep from moving ourselves toward our health goals. Unfortunately, the only person who can make the decision to eat well during all those times is YOU. Now, that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your favourite treats on special occasions, but it does mean that sometimes you’re going to have to make some tough choices if you want to stay healthy and fit. Or at least not get further behind. Actually, for many people at this time of year, maintaining your weight is just as good as losing any.
What keeps us on this hamster wheel of on-again, off-again dieting cycles is an All-Or-Nothing mentality. And that’s what diets teach us. Even food commercials and TV personalities talk about food as good or bad, our behaviour when eating certain things as good or bad, and we translate that into whether WE, as a person, are good or bad. From there we put ourselves into a cycle of guilt and deprivation, and continue to label ourselves for whatever efforts we expend (or don’t) in losing weight or getting healthier.
What if you made all the healthy changes in your life that it was possible to make and you didn’t lose any weight at all? Based on our dieting mindset that would mean we were an abject failure. I mean, come on - ALL healthy efforts are supposed to end in weight loss, right? Well, not so much.
I’ve written before about what a complicated thing weight loss is. So let’s think about it differently for a minute. Your body is an amazingly complex organism, containing trillions of cells, thousands of different components, and it functions autonomously every single day. There are thousands of processes taking place inside your body at any given moment, all of which rely on what you feed into it. And you feed it with your thoughts, your environment, your quality of sleep, the air you breathe, what you put on your skin, and what you eat and drink. So putting healthy things into your body is going to have a tremendous effect on all those functions and processes. It just might not be visible from the outside at first.
Even when we end up with diseases or illnesses, the reality is that those things were developing internally for a while (sometimes years) before the external symptoms appeared. And in most cases they are symptoms of the way we have been treating our body and the way it is functioning. When you treat the symptoms of any illness, all you do is mask what’s causing it rather than actually healing it. While maybe not the most scientific comparison, I view weight loss in the same way. There are a lot of processes involved in healing our relationship with food, our relationship with our bodies, and our relationship with ourselves, and until those internal things are dealt with, any external changes we manage to make are likely to be temporary. Like when we go on a diet.
We didn’t gain weight overnight. Binge eating and self-starvation are not normal physiological processes, they are emotional ones. We’re taught that eating - or not eating - makes us feel a certain way. Food is available at every turn. Companies tell us that we have to have snacks to take along or we’ll starve before we get home at the end of the day. And so on. There’s a lot of pressure to eat. There’s a lot of confusing information about what is healthy. There’s a lot of baggage we all carry as it relates to our bodies, our minds, and our approach to nutrition and wellness.
So we enter January with our New Year’s Resolutions.
Starting January 1st I’m going to become a vegetarian.
Starting January 1st I’m joining Diet Program X and I’m going to lose 30 pounds
Starting January 1st I’m going to get up at 5:00 every morning and go to the gym
Starting January 1st I’m going to stop drinking alcohol and I’ll drink a gallon of water every day instead
And somewhere between January 15th and February 1st (if we even make it that far), we miss one day and then decide that we just can’t do it. We’ve failed. We’re failures. We’ve resolved NOTHING.
It doesn’t have to be that way. What if there was a way to change your thinking so that New Year’s Resolutions didn’t even need to exist? What if you could take baby steps, tiny steps, that are so easy you can’t NOT take them? Sure, that approach doesn’t give you a quick fix, but then again, how have your quick fix approaches worked for you in the past? All-or-nothing thinking usually ends up at nothing because most of the time, all is simply impossible. So how about this: try all-or-SOMETHING thinking instead. Didn’t manage 100% of that thing you wanted to do, but you managed 50%? That’s something, and more than 0, so give yourself credit for doing that much and see if you can do 51% next time. Even just 1% is still better than 0. And it will get you a lot closer to your goals than doing nothing.
It has taken me a long time to shift my mindset from all-or-nothing thinking and a diet mentality to one that actually makes sense and keeps me sane. I’m not going to lie - it takes time and consistent effort. And like anything else worthwhile, if you want to get there you have to do the work. I’d love to tell you there’s some crazy “hack” or fast track to get you where you want to be. But there isn’t. It all comes down to your own choices. You are in control, and you are also your own worst enemy when it comes to things like health and weight loss. But what the heck - the time is going to go by anyway, so why not try something different and see how it works for you? Even if it doesn’t work, you haven’t failed, you’ve just discovered a thing that doesn’t work for you. When we ditch all-or-nothing thinking, we can play and experiment with an open mind. It helps us be a lot more gentle with ourselves and gets us to where we want to be a whole lot faster in the end because we’re willing to keep trying until we find what does work.
The only way I was able to accomplish what I have is by working with a coach. I worked out with a trainer for many years and that kept my physical body in pretty good shape, but it didn’t stop me binge-eating popcorn whenever I was stressed. It didn’t stop me from buying bulk bags of gummy bears and eating them in secret, hiding them from anyone who might find out that this “health nut” was eating such things in volume. Yep, I’ve been there. I did that.
We are all flawed beings. We all have crazy habits and idiosyncrasies that make us who we are. And this life we’re living is a big, crazy experiment. Everything we do is done on a continuum, so if we want to get better at something, all we have to do is work at moving a little, tiny bit in the direction we want to go. And once we do, we can see about moving one more notch. Success builds success, and resolutions resolve nothing.
Instead of trying to make sweeping changes this year, try focusing on the small things you do every day. What habits do you have that keep you stuck? What is ONE THING you could do differently that would help you move forward? It’s a simple exercise, but not necessarily an easy one. And that’s why you need to do it. Just start somewhere small. See how it feels to do all-or-something.
If you need help with these things, I would be honoured to be part of your wellness team. I’m a good coach. I’ve made (and continue to make) this journey myself, and I understand how hard it is to even know where to start. You just have to start somewhere. Instead of spending time thinking about sweeping resolutions for the new year, give some thought to investing in your own health and wellbeing. Get the support of someone who can help guide you on that journey. The time is going to to by anyway, so if whatever you’ve been doing isn’t working, isn’t it about time to try a different approach?
I’m here for you.
Have a health of a day,
Juli