New Year’s Resolutions Bring More Harm Than Good

by ANNIE STENT

New Year’s resolutions are often seen as an opportunity for self-improvement in the coming year. The clock striking midnight on New Year’s Eve is seen as a reset, a chance for people to make a promise to themselves. The cliché of breaking that promise within the first few weeks is one that people are used to, but an overlooked reality is that New Year’s Resolutions can easily trigger disordered eating.

exercise can be positive goals for some people. However, the increased mentions of diet and exercise around the holiday can be very harmful for those recovering from or currently struggling with eating disorders. This harm occurs whether they make a resolution of this nature or not.

Hearing a family member, friend or even stranger set goals regarding their bodies can cause a similar desire in the mind of a disordered eater because eating disorders are inherently competitive.

New Year’s resolutions are not very effective in the first place and often leave people feeling as though they have failed when they don’t fully carry out their resolutions. At the very least, New Year’s resolutions are forgotten. By February of 2021, 80% of people admitted to abandoning their resolutions for 2021.

With a new year, there is often the strange expectation that we will achieve goals that we weren’t able to in the previous year. This is not to say that all resolutions are impossible, but we seem to forget that there is no magical change on Jan. 1. Our lives are generally still the same, and the same obstacles that kept us from sticking to our resolutions the year before still remain.

Despite this, we still make resolutions, which can be positive, but many tend to contain ideas of fitness or weight loss. In 2019, 59% of resolutions included a desire to exercise more and 48% included a desire to lose weight. There is nothing wrong with either resolution, and weight loss or increased

According to April Lyons M.D., L.P.C., who specializes in eating disorders, an eating disorder can in some cases feel like a competition to be the thinnest, so hearing someone wanting to change or shrink their body can activate that competition. Even if it does not stem from a competitive desire, hearing someone talk about their body with a desire to change it brings up those thoughts for disordered eaters. While your goal might entail going to the gym a few more times a week or adding a salad to a meal, this might entail more harmful tendencies for someone with an eating disorder.

Disordered eating was something that I struggled with for a while and is probably something that I will be continually working against for most of my life. In past years, my New Year’s resolutions included pictures of what I wanted to look like, numbers I wanted to be and calorie tracking apps that were going to get me there. Obviously, those behaviors were not just occurring around New Year’s, but the holiday was a time when I would really reset and focus on my goals, no matter how harmful they were to me. Hearing my family members talk about the work out regimens they were starting or meal plans they were using made me feel like this was normal. Everyone was doing it, so I should too.

To be clear, hearing someone have a fitness goal as a resolution is not the sole reason that a disordered eater struggles. Additionally, while there is also nothing wrong with wanting to make changes in

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Staff Writers........................................................Sutton Inouye, Jake Lieberman, Ellie McCusker, Jimena Amaro-Cordova, Parker Ashton, Caroline Clack, Asher Darling, Gabriella Foster, Amelie Giomi, Lucas Kawamoto, Miki Kimura, Eleanor Kinder, Asher Lev, Andrew Levitt, Sienna Lew, Alyssa McAdams, Devon Schaefer, Aaron Widjaja Adviser.................................................................Tripp Robbins the new year, it is important to recognize that sharing fitness or weight loss goals can be triggering. Discussing your plans for changing your appearance or general fitness, especially if those plans may not even last far past February, is not worth the harm it may cause your loved ones. There are less triggering ways to speak about fitness or even weight loss goals. Phrasing exercise goals along the lines of “I want to get stronger” is much more positive than “I want to burn more calories this year.” Unfortunately, knowing what will or won’t trigger people is hard, so avoiding the topic, especially in a time when it tends to come up a bit more often than usual, is the best option. becomes triggering is also an option. Naturally changing the subject or even being more direct and saying, “Hey, can we talk about something else?” does not have to be a big deal and if someone does change the subject, saying “Okay,” or just quickly going along with it is important. can be positive. They can be opportunities to take agency in a new year, a new chapter of your life. However, we need to be aware of when and how New Year’s resolutions surrounding fitness and body image can be harmful in order to cultivate a more universally positive experience.