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Question: I like making New Year’s resolutions, but they often fail. What can I do instead?
Answer:
January loves to give us ‘new year, new me’ vibes. It is the month for resolutions and dramatic goals because it feels like the year is a blank slate. Even though I have not set a resolution in years (possibly decades), I still wake up in January with a craving to revamp myself. I always think this might be the year I finally get more sleep or drink mushroom tea instead of coffee. And then regular life takes over, I get tired, and that’s the end of that until next year. But the reality is that many of us feel this pull. And many of us find that resolutions do not stick.
New Year’s Resolutions not only typically fail; they reek of diet culture.
In just a bit, I will share a few ideas on how to make changes that last, but first, let’s chat a little about why resolutions fail and how they are cloaked in diet culture.
Some people approach resolutions with a strong internal sense of self-compassion and a clear head about changes that work for them. If that is you, then you are on the right track.
But in my experience, that is not how most people approach resolutions.
Often resolutions make you feel like you are never good enough. Never thin enough, never fit enough, never healthy enough. They make you feel like everything needs an overhaul: your skin, your wardrobe, your house, maybe even your cat.
Resolutions can prompt extremes such as cutting out all sugar or never picking up a smart phone again. They can also make you feel like you need to spend money on a supplement, a program, or a new product that promises to change your life.
This ‘never-good-enough’ vibe is directly rooted in diet culture. Diet culture would like you to believe that you must lose weight no matter your body size and that the next extreme program will contain the answer and give you the body you have always wanted. And then you will finally have the life you have always wanted.
But it’s a lie.
Diet culture is a lie. Most extreme diets are not sustainable nor do they work in the long term. If you lose weight, you may still not have the life you have always wanted. And on the other hand, you do not need to lose weight to have the life you always wanted.
Resolutions are a lie. Promising to never touch another drop of sugar might last until February or if you are among the very determined, possibly March. Deciding to change your life because it is January can feel great in the moment, but by spring, most of us are slogging through the usual routine.
The truth is that resolutions fail because they are often out of tune with our real lives and our true selves and they are driven by guilt or a sense of ‘never-enough’. This is not a recipe for success.
The reality is that there are kinder and more effective ways to make changes to your life than guilt-induced resolutions.
And the reality is that no matter how little water you drink or how much time you spend on your phone, you are a worthy person with much to offer the world. Full stop.
Let’s start from there.
Perhaps you do want to make a change. Perhaps there is some part of your life that bothers you or you wish you could do differently. That is true for most of us.
January can be a great time to reflect on the past year and think about what is important to you in the coming year. The start of a new year can feel like a great time to make changes. But the calendar does not need to limit you. Spring might feel even better because you get a renewed burst of energy with the longer and warmer days. Or perhaps you like to orient goals around the school year. My point is there is nothing magical about January. Make your life work for you.
Here is an example from my own life of a change that I made (spoiler: it had nothing to do with January or resolutions):
In my early twenties, I was diagnosed with high cholesterol. Because of this, I became interested in understanding how food impacts my body and I decided to become a dietitian. But just like becoming a dietitian took five years of education, making changes to my diet took just as long.
For example, I used to eat Pop-tarts for breakfast. I did not wake up one day, toss the Pop-tarts, and swear them off forever. I took some time to figure out what foods higher in fiber and unsaturated fats I might enjoy for breakfast. I experimented with oatmeal, yogurt, protein bars, toast, eggs. You name it, I tried it over a long period of time. I eventually settled on a routine of oatmeal in the winter and yogurt in the summer. Although full disclosure, now that I have small children, I am trying to figure out a new routine with breakfast.
During all the experimenting with breakfast foods, sometimes I still had Pop-tarts. Eventually, the other foods pushed out the Pop-tarts and I forgot about them; however, if I craved them when I passed them at the grocery store, I bought them. But eventually I found they tasted better in my memory than in reality, and they started going stale in the cupboard.
The point is that I changed my food preference for breakfast (and for many other meals), but it took a long time and very little willpower or dramatic change. The changes were so small and incremental that I hardly noticed them, until I woke up years later and realized I eat completely differently in my 30s than I did in my early 20s.
As you can see, change is not inherently the problem. Change can be helpful and make life better. But there are kinder ways to approach change that provide a better chance of success than the bare-knuckled annual resolution challenge.
Below are four of my favorite steps in working through a change. These ideas are compiled from my years working as a dietitian and from my personal approach to change.
A Kinder Approach: Four Steps to Change That Actually Stick
Step 1: Clarify What Matters to YOU
Figure out what is truly important to YOU. Not to your mom or your best friend or your favorite Instagram influencer. To YOU. It is your life – anything you work on changing should matter to you. Clarifying what matters to you is key in deciding what to spend time on.
Life is short. You cannot do everything. Maybe you really do not care about drinking more water. Then don’t. There is freedom in deciding what NOT to do and what really matters.
Step 2: Understand How You Operate
Understanding yourself is key to making change. Some people do best with small simple changes, some people do better with grandiose overhauls. Some people need external accountability; some people will absolutely refuse do something if someone else tells them to. Knowing whether you are a night owl or operate best in the morning can be crucial in deciding what time of day to add in a new habit.
Gretchen Rubin’s book Better Than Before has an excellent framework for helping discern how you best operate. She asks questions in the “Self-Knowledge” section that make a great guide if you do not know where to start.
Step 3: Pick ONE thing
Maybe several things matter to you and you want to change them all. Write them down, then pick one and throw the rest away (burn them if you are into the latest TikTok approach). Working on only one change at a time gives you a better chance of accomplishing it. If focusing on ‘just one thing’ sounds too easy, good. That is exactly the point. Easy is doable.
When this change is entrenched in your life, then you can go back to the drawing board and work on something different. The beauty of this approach is that oftentimes making one change has a domino effect and can spur multiple changes at once. For example, drinking more water may lead you to drinking less coffee even though your focus is on water.
Side note: If you are one of the few people who do better with the aforementioned grandiose overhauls, then by all means change everything all at once. That works for the chosen few, but not for the many.
Step 4: Habit Stack the Heck Out of It
Attach the new thing to something you already do. Most people have habits or routines, even if they are not elaborate. Your habit may be as simple as putting on socks every day or arriving home from work a few days a week. You may not even put your socks on or arrive home at the same time every day, but you DO these things regularly. This is a habit. Most people can identify a handful of habits if they look closely at their daily routine. The goal is to attach your new habit to an existing one.
For example, if you want to take your vitamins regularly, put them next to your toothbrush (if you brush your teeth regularly, which is highly recommended). This will remind you to take your vitamins when you brush your teeth. Or if you want to go for a walk regularly, consider doing this immediately when you get home from work before you get settled in for the evening. The possibilities are as endless as your current habits and routine.
When you add a new practice to an old habit, you create an easy prompt to remind you to do it. This lays the framework for making a new habit. Forming a habit is crucial to making something feel effortless.
Speaking of effort, it is important to recognize that willpower gets you nowhere. Willpower is like a muscle; it gets tired with use. You can tap into willpower for so long, but if you are like most people, your reserve of willpower is used up quickly. Maybe even by breakfast if you have small kids. Certainly, most people have little willpower left by the end of the day. It is helpful not to rely on it. This is why habit-stacking is so effective. It takes willpower out of the equation.
Brief note on time: Change takes the time that it takes. There is no formula, no guarantee, no timeline for how long it will take to accomplish a goal. Nor is there a point of ‘arrival’ for most habits as they are often cyclical and the practice of them can ebb and flow with the seasons. You may feel the change has been established in a few months or even weeks. It may take years. That is okay. You may do something for a while and then stop. This is all part of being human.
Perhaps you already made a few resolutions, but feel like you might be on shaky ground. It is okay to pause, reframe your current resolutions through the above four steps, and adjust how you move forward. Any changes you implement should serve you, not the other way around.
In summary, resolutions often make us feel like a failure by February. That’s a terrible way to start the year. Instead of setting resolutions that require an intense amount of effort, let’s change our approach to take into account our unique lives and selves. Habits are about creating actions with little effort. That is much more sustainable.
If you want additional support around making sustainable changes, feel free to reach out to us at Eat Well Collective. We love helping people make changes that stick and often hear that we have helped people change not just their habits, but also how they think about themselves.
Want to Explore Further?
Check out these Instagrams for relatable, real-time approaches to change:
Leila’s Gentle Glow-ups: This 42-year-old mum is not trying to glow up in the traditional sense. She is primarily wanting to get her sense of self back while enduring the wrecking ball of parenting small children. She has the most beautiful, compassionate approach to change and quite literally takes one step at a time.
Scottee’s Instagram: This dude cusses a lot, but he has a real-world approach to change and health. I appreciate that he is not afraid of his body nor does he feel the need to shrink it or excuse it. Click here for his colorful take on resolutions.
Check out these books to dive deeper into what matters to you:
These books are not full of classic behavior change content. Instead, they help you think about what matters in life and how to change your thinking.
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman – Oliver asks how you want to spend your finite time. And better yet, helps you “decide in advance what to fail at.” Because the reality is that our choices for how we spend our time are numerous and sometimes perfectly good things can distract us from what really matters to us.
The Lazy Genius Way by Kendra Adachi – Kendra also asks you what matters to you and helps you apply that premise in every area of your life. She also has some practical tips for everyday life. Thanks to her I now batch clean my kitchen after a meal.
Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin and Getting Started: Habits | Gretchen Rubin – These resources contain excellent insight into habit formation and how we can make change stick although be sure to watch out for diet culture and fat-phobia potholes as they are sprinkled throughout.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Please do not hesitate to get in touch via email at [email protected]. In addition, feel free to reach out if you have a nutrition question that you would like answered in this advice column. All questions are posted anonymously.
If you would like to work directly with a dietitian at Eat Well Collective, feel free to contact us at here or schedule directly here.
