With the beginning of the year rolling around, many people set resolutions for themselves in the hopes of improving their lives in some aspect. The most popular New Year's resolutions are to lose weight, quit smoking and to focus on being more financially responsible. While these sound-like good goals most people who make New Year's resolutions don't end up accomplishing what they set out to do. Some of these popular resolutions can harm you.
Although weight loss, exercise, and health are popular buzzwords around the beginning of January, weight loss should be a by-product of eating more healthier food – not the main goal of the new year. This focus on pure weight loss can fuel the diet culture industry as well as promoting behaviors that are associated with eating disorders. Reading headlines that encourage people to never eat foods with more than a handful of ingredients or any processed food is a highly unrealistic idea for everybody to incorporate into their lives as a way to become "more healthy." Many tasty healthy foods have a long ingredient list and certain food processing techniques such as pasteurization protects the consumer from foodborne illnesses. Thinking that you need to cut out "bad" foods can lead to cravings and later binging on said food you restricted from yourself, which is why most diets fail with the first two weeks.
Anyone who goes to the gym a few times a week dreads the large influx of newly motivated people rushing to gyms to work on their new resolution to exercise more when more than half of those people will not be showing up in a few weeks. In my opinion, people should not worry so much about how crowded space is because no matter the duration of their membership, they paid the same as a usual member. While a gym has fancy equipment, exercising more does not have to be push-ups or hours on a treadmill, just finding more practical ways to move during the day will also help improve your health.
The biggest issue I have with New Year's resolutions is how society holds the belief that you are only allowed to make big goals during the first day of the year. If there is a noticeable part of life that could use improvement, why put it off until January when it could be worked on as soon as possible. If someone is not comfortable with how much they weigh, they could exercise or alter the food they intake whenever they see fit. This could be celebrated as a personal resolution day if proclaiming a certain goal is an important aspect of finding success. By following the statistic of the majority of resolutions are not successful, less pressure would be involved if everyone gave themselves a chance to start over if the expected goal was not met at any point in the year.
