Why You Should Rethink Weight Loss As A New Year’s Resolution (and what to do instead)

Happy 2019!

How does it feel to start another new chapter? Like a blank notebook, a clean slate, the new year has come. Okay–it may have brought its 2018 hangover with it. But all in all, it’s a promise of new things to come, new goals to reach, a new person to become.

I know this time of year is when everyone starts thinking about eating healthy and losing weight as part of their new year’s resolutions. And while I’m all for getting proactive about your health and making changes to better your quality of life, I’m not really a fan of these resolutions. To be clear, I love resolutions. I love goal setting. There’s something very empowering about sitting down at the start of the year and day dreaming of all of its potential. There’s nothing I love more than to write down what I want to accomplish in the new year.

And I think you can absolutely make goals this time of year that deal with your health. But here’s why I don’t think Losing Weight is a good New Year’s resolution.

1. Weight Loss resolutions tend to be super vague.

Often, these goals lack structure: “I’m going to eat better in the New Year”. “I’m going to work out more”. “I’m going to be healthy”. Right, but what do these actually mean? What is healthier, what is more, what is better? Without clearly defining what these things actually look like, we make it impossible to actually achieve. I mean think about it: you can always eat better. You can always work out more. So how do you know when you’ve reached that goal? How to you benchmark it to make sure you’re on track?

What to do instead: Have clear, actionable goals so they are easier to achieve. For example: “I’m going to meal prep every Sunday” or “I’m going to work out in the mornings for 30 minutes twice a week”. This way, you know exactly whether or not you’re on track, and you can relax the rest of the time, not stressing or feeling guilty about whether you’re doing enough.

2. We put too much pressure on ourselves to change overnight.

I’m a big fan of indulging during the holidays. As someone with a history of disordered eating, the holidays used to be an absolute nightmare for me. What have I done? How could I have eaten so much? Tish, did you really need that piece of cheesecake/chocolate/blah blah blah. I would panic, loathe myself and promise that starting January 1st I would do a complete 180. For years, my resolutions were things like ‘get fit’, ‘lose ten pounds’, ‘stop eating sugar’. And what did I do the week leading up to the New Year? Gorge. Eat everything and anything in sight “while I could”. Then the new year rolled around, I had momentum for about a week before I inevitably craved something I “shouldn’t” eat, and I spent my time either miserable because I didn’t allow myself to eat something, or guilty because I did.

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Creating drastic goals like this set me up to fail for two reasons: 1) It gave me an all-or-nothing mindset. Just because I ate too much on Christmas eve or at holiday parties, didn’t mean I had to ‘fall off the bandwagon’, so to speak, and eat junk food the rest of the week. 2) It left me with impossibly high expectations, that burned that much more when I couldn’t comply. I would be eating so “good” and “clean” (words I absolutely hate to use when it comes to healthy eating because of how harmful that mentality is) and then one day, I’d want a brownie. If I allowed myself to eat it, I’d feel so much guilt, and shame, and then decide that for the rest of the day, my diet was off! Free binge! Instead of just eating one brownie, suddenly I’d give myself license to eat the whole tray.

What to do instead: when it comes to healthy eating, I like to think only as far as my next meal. What does that mean? It means that I try to make sure my next meal is healthy. So maybe I wake up, have a smoothie or oatmeal. Then a salad for lunch. But then someone at work has brought rice krispy squares, so I’ll eat one, cause yum. Sometimes two, cause yum yum. And then, instead of tossing out my healthy eating for the day, I make my next meal a nutritious one–maybe I have roasted chicken and vegetables. And you know what? Knowing me, I still have dessert that night.

I try not to leave room for guilt and negative feelings around food. You’re not failing if you eat something that is “bad” for you. Eating healthy is a big picture thing–your Friday night beers and pizza isn’t what derails your success. It’s your week of skipping meals, eating processed foods and forgetting to put whole, fresh foods into your body. It’s deciding that for the rest of the weekend you’ll eat garbage, and “start fresh on Monday”.

 For all the years I tried to lose weight as my resolution–I never did. The second I stopped thinking about it, I was able to not only lose weight, but keep it off.

This year, aim to create realistic–and attainable–goals for your health! If you’ve never worked out before, don’t commit to 5 days a week at the gym. You’ll burn out, you’ll be exhausted and sore, and you’ll give up. Aim for 1-2 times a week. Build from there.

If your diet currently consists of frozen pizzas and takeout, aim to meal prep at least one batch of something healthy a week. Maybe a chilli, or prepped ingredients to make salads all week. Don’t deprive yourself of food–don’t cut out entire food groups simply for weight loss. If you’re thinking “ugh, I really miss XYZ”, you’re setting yourself up for failure. It’s human nature to want what we can’t have. So instead of saying no sugar all together (and then craving it every minute of the day), know that you can have it, and trust yourself to know that if you do eat it, you can come back strong at your next meal!

I hope this helps you in your 2019 health journey! Want to know more about healthy weight loss? Let me know in the comments!

Happy 2019–it’s going to be a great year!