Why I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions & What I do instead!
This week I wanted to talk about why I don’t make New Year’s resolutions and what I do instead. Happy New Year! Hope you’ve had a fantastic festive season. Have you made any New Year’s Resolutions for this year? How are you feeling about them?
Check out my video below to find out why I don’t make them, or keep scrolling to read the blog.
It’s that time of year isn’t it?! Stuff about New Year’s Resolutions is everywhere! I keep seeing adverts for slimming clubs and joining the gym. Plus there’s social media posts about New Year’s Resolutions all over the place too. Some of it’s advertising the latest trendy diets or diet products. Or else it’s what individual people are doing themselves. There always seems to be a focus on weight loss and fitness. As well as people talking about how to be successful with your New Year’s Resolutions too.
New Year; Same Old Me!
I haven’t made New Year’s Resolutions in years, in fact I don’t even know if I ever have done! I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions, because they always seems to be about self-punishment in some way. There always seems to be a focus on how you’re not good enough as you are now. You’ve gotta improve yourself in some way; ‘New Year, New You’! “This is the year you’re going to be a better person, a better version of yourself!”
The ‘All or Nothing’ Mentality doesn’t help you!
When it comes to your eating habits I see you go to the extremes. So you’ve had all the festive feasting with all the excesses; drinking loads, eating ALL the goodies. Now it’s going the other way where you decide you need to ‘be good’. You’re cutting out food and restricting yourself. I’m all for taking the time-out to review your eating habits and look at how you can build healthier habits. But taking it to the extreme just never works, like cutting out whole food groups. Or banning the foods that you love, like chocolate, cakes and puddings. If you tell yourself you’re not allowed to have those things you’re just going to want them more.
Dieting is too drastic to be sustainable.
Another thing I see you doing is trying to change everything. You try to change your whole diet or follow a diet plan that’s completely different to what you normally do. Or you’re trying to eat perfectly coz you think there’s a right way that you should be eating and you have to get it all right or you’ve ‘failed’. All of this eating ‘clean’ or ‘perfectly’ doesn’t work, because it’s too drastic. The more different it is from what you normally do, the less likely it will last long. Human beings are creatures of habit, we like to do the same thing day in day out. We like to do what’s easy.
Tweak it instead!
If you know you could do with making some improvements to your eating habits, forget trying to change so much. It’s so much easier to tweak it; make little changes to what you normally do and change gradually. Also expect it to take time and effort to build new healthier habits. You might think you’ve got 10 things you need to tweak – just pick one or two to start off with. Then when you’re used to those changes and they’ve become new habits, look at the next tweak you could make. Build it up from there instead of trying to change it all, coz that won’t work and you’ll only end up feeling rubbish. Then you think you’re a failure and that you can’t change at all – we don’t want any of that!
Ditch the New Year’s Resolutions & make a Wish List instead.
So forget those New Year’s Resolutions – what I do instead is I make a wish list. My wish list might actually include a specific habit I want to build around eating better or doing more exercise. Sometimes it’s about big goals I’ve got, sometimes it’s about little goals and things I want to achieve during the year. Mostly it’s about what I want to do during the year. Last year I wanted to try aerial hoop and I did it! It helped that I got a voucher for Christmas to do an aerial hoop course and I loved it!
Sometimes I include places I want to visit on my wish list or activities I want to try. Sometimes it’s about sorting stuff out round the house we’ve been renovating since 2017! But mostly it’s a wish list of fun things I want to do. Last year I set myself a couple of fun challenges. You might remember ’22 hills in 2022′ from my weekly round-up at the end of each blog post. This was a little family challenge to try and get back into hill walking, which was something my husband Sam and I used to do a lot before we had our little girl. So partly it was about trying to get back into that and partly to encourage a love of nature and walking in our little girl Genevieve. We nailed it and enjoyed it too – mostly!
Another challenge I set myself last year was ’22 new books in 2022′. This was to encourage myself to go to the library more regularly and read books that I haven’t read before. After the pandemic with all the lockdowns, I got out of the habit of going to the library. I like to read real books you can hold and I do buy new books, but usually I prefer to borrow them. The library were only offering a service where they chose books for you, which I didn’t like the idea of. So I ended up reading a lot of the same books over and over again e.g. ‘Pride & Prejudice’. I wanted to encourage myself to read new books so I set myself the challenge and it was fun – I almost finished 23 new books in the end!
Let go of the pressure to be ‘better’.
My wish list isn’t about putting pressure on myself or trying to be better. It’s about looking at how to have more fun and more fulfilment in my life. If you have more fun and feel more satisfied in your life, you’re less likely to have issues around eating. Issues like eating for your emotions; comfort eating or stress eating – then feeling rubbish about yourself for doing that!
If making a wish list sounds good to you – and remember you don’t have to do anything unless you really want to! Have a think about the following questions to help you make a wish list:
- What do you want out of life?
- What do you wish for this year?
- What might bring you more fun and more fulfilment in your life?
You might decide to make a list of 10-12 things that maybe you try one thing per month. But give it a go and let me know how you get on.
Of course if breaking-free from yo-yo dieting is on your list this year, get in touch!
Ditch dieting forever. You deserve better.
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My Weekly Round-up! AKA; what I’ve been up to recently…
- This week’s blog post has been brought to you by ‘English Breakfast’ tea. I’m planning to treat myself to some Earl Grey Vanilla tea-bags with my Christmas/birthday money. I have to get it online as nowhere stocks it round here. Fingers crossed it comes quick as I fancy something different!
- Eeek I turned 40 this week and I can’t quite believe it. Seems too grown-up! We didn’t do much as I didn’t really want to do anything big. There’s a new cafe in town, which we had a discount card for from the Vegan Fair last month. We gave it a go and the food was good. Will definitely be going back.
- Genevieve was meant to be back at school on Wednesday, but she was poorly. So it’s been a bit of a slow start getting back into things. I’ll be honest I’ve lost track of what day it is.
- After two weeks of not really doing much apart from eating and chilling, my back was starting to get pretty stiff! We decided to go up The Wrekin on New Year’s Day. It was lovely, but a bit of a shock to the system – I was pretty achy for a few days!
- I’ve slowly been trying to get back into my walks along the brook after the school run. As well as my little exercise routine. I’m not quite up to my usual amount, but building it back up gradually.
- Bird Nerd Report: This morning I saw a flock of long-tailed tits – one of my fave birds so that was a good start to getting back into walking. Also saw a bird of prey – not sure what type. As well as a very cute gold crest tweeting away in a tree above my head.
