New Year New You

New Year New You? It’s a no from us.

Why the New Year New You mentality benefits diet culture and not your health. If you’re looking for an alternative to the New Year New You rhetoric in 2024, then look no further. Here’s how a dietitian would reframe your new year resolutions. We’ve compiled some simple more sustainable ways to reframe the tired old diet culture ridden health goals of the past.

In 2024 the top new year’s resolutions were: (according to a Forbes survey amongst 1,000 U.S adults) :

• • 48% improve their fitness
  • 38% improve their finances
  • 36% improve their mental health
  • 34% would like to lose weight
  • 32% would like to improve their diet

This time of year highest consideration period for health and wellness products. Diet and weight loss product and service industry is already a $245.9B market! Most of these businesses spend the most amount of their advertising dollars between Christmas and mid January!! They capitalise on our vulnerabilities and keep telling us we’re never enough- small enough, fit enough or eating well enough. It’s a new year so you have to create a new you!!

Physical & mental harm

From the science, we know that diets which encourage us to lose weight at all costs is linked with body dissatisfaction, poor self-esteem and disordered eating behaviours – which are all ironically at the detriment to our physical and mental health!! We also know that most weight loss attempts through dieting fail (NHMRC highest level of evidence tells us this) and most people actually re-gain the weight within 1-5 years – it’s not a sustainable way to become “healthy” in fact weight cycling and yo-yo dieting are linked with poor health outcomes!

It’s also part of the reason diets are an excellent business model, they’ll place the blame onto the person who “fails” the diet. Not enough “will power” so just “try harder” next time. When attempt after attempt, people continue to “fail”. When in fact, the diet is the thing failing us! They’re designed like this, as an unsustainable way to consume food and exercise, for most people.

What to do instead?

If you are a goal orientated person it’s a wonderful thing to set goals and if this is something you enjoy doing then you do you! It’s wonderful to reflect on the year that was, there may be down time after the big year we’ve had but there is absolutely no need to actually set new years resolutions, the 1^st of January is just another day! Some things that we really encourage people to do instead is reframe some of those common health goals!

If you are setting healthy behaviours rather than weight loss being the main goal:

• Rather than eating less and cutting foods out
  • Try cooking more, increasing the variety of foods on our plate – your microbiome will love you more for it, reframing meal planning as an act of self-care rather than a chore- it’s about looking after your mind
• Rather than changing the way we eat for our physical health
  • Can we consider what and how we eat for our mental wellbeing too.
    • When it comes to the WHAT of eating, there’s a whole heap of science coming out around the link between what we eat and our mental wellbeing.
    • Then there’s the long forgotten HOW of eating, thinking about how we feel around food, tuning in with our hunger and fullness cues, our eating environment and how we can celebrate all that foods gives us beyond nutrition.
• Rather than changing our body shape and size
  • Can we change the way we speak to ourselves and our bodies, appreciating it for everything it does for us and have done for us this past year
  • Practicing self compassion – which is just the practice of giving ourselves the same care we would give to a loved one.
  • If you’re really struggling with this, first and foremost seek health professional advice but if you want some really practical in the moment tips:
    • Reduce social media time, unfollow accounts that make you feel worse about your body and diversity your feed with
    • Wearing clothes that fit your body in that moment
    • Nourish your body no matter what you ate yesterday, today or what you’re eating tomorrow.
• Rather than thinking you can go it all alone.
  • Could you book in regular GP checkups, therapists appointments, dentists appointments  etc
    • This is really reframing the act of self care- it’s not all about bubble baths and massages!!

Now this is not an exhaustive list of ways to reframe your health goals to ditch diet culture, but hopefully a spring board to knock over the’New Year New You’ mentality. If you need more support in shifting the way you think and act towards food and your body you can always give our WIRL Mood & Food app a go with our 7-day free trial. Please know that you are enough just the way you are!