I’m ditching New Year’s diets in 2022, and you should too

On Jan. 1, many of us implement self-improvement tactics like meditating daily or learning a new language to improve our quality of life during the new year. These goals, or resolutions, that we work to achieve during the following 12 months present themselves annually in a pattern that dates back centuries. 

In middle school, the beginning of another year offered me a chance to reinvent myself. Nearly every year, exercising more often and eating healthy were at the top of my “new year, new me” agenda. I begged that the fat — and my insecurities — would disappear with introducing these behaviors. When I failed to implement these habits permanently, I felt terrible about myself, which made me feel angry. 

I decided to stop making New Year’s resolutions in 2021 to remove the pressure I put on myself to change my physical appearance. The diets I tried and the gym memberships I purchased didn’t make me feel healthier or happier. Instead, I felt as if I repeatedly tried and failed to fit a “beautiful” mold that wasn’t attainable for me. 

Diet culture perpetuates self-hate and bodily prejudice in the name of self-improvement at all times of the year. The goal of this propaganda is to persuade folks to purchase costly subscriptions and products, promising them a way to rid themselves of their insecurities, and heavily profiting as a result. However, diet and fitness ads increase in bulk during January, from offering discounts on weight loss plans to promoting “health-enhancing” regimens on social media, in magazines, and in commercials to capitalize on resolution-culture.

Like me, Healthcare Executive and mother Laira Roth has also felt self-directed frustration at being unable to accomplish a health-related New Year’s resolution. For that reason, at the end of 2021, she decided that she would stop falling prey to the pressure to set resolutions. 

In previous years, Roth set goals pertaining to changing her physical appearance, like losing weight. She downloaded apps such as Weight Watchers and exercised at an unsustainable frequency for a few weeks to accomplish this goal. Roth would feel frustrated and have negative thoughts about her body when she hadn’t reached her goal in her desired timeframe. 

“With the goal of having a ‘perfect’ body, I was very focused on food and not in a good way,” Roth said. “It’s an unfortunately vicious cycle.”

Roth and I aren’t alone in this struggle. According to data from a Discover Happy Habits study, more than half of New Year’s resolutions pertain to health-related causes. However, only 7% are successful in keeping them.

The rapid development of technology in the 21st century created a platform to promote diet culture further. Since the invention of social media in the early 2000s, body satisfaction and poor body image have grown more prevalent among social media users. Diet culture capitalizes on this self-hatred, especially during the new year, promoting falsified instant weight loss techniques instead of sustainable eating habits.

This industry promises its subscribers happiness by achieving the “perfect” body. In reality, however, all that it accomplishes is forcibly cultivating an unhealthy expectation of beauty and health that is unattainable for most people. 

The diet, wellness, and beauty industries manipulate and perpetuate consumers’ feelings of shame after the holiday season through underhanded strategies that convince consumers that they have over-indulged during the holidays to rope them into purchasing subscriptions that will help them “detox,” or “start fresh.”

For example, a strategy coined as “confirm shaming” is how this industry coerces individuals into purchasing subscriptions through guilt-tripping them about their physical health. On the ad pop-up, individuals either click on the bolded “Subscribe” or the smaller text, reading something along the lines of a shameful “No, I don’t care enough.” This marketing strategy encourages body shaming among members and nonmembers alike. 

Women’s rights advocate Catherine Lacour has struggled with body image due to self-made comparisons between herself and the thin models in the magazines that she read while in high school. When the new year rolled around, she was always ready to improve that she thought would change her for the better.

“We’re conditioned by society to never be happy and always be trying to improve,” Lacour said. “Looking back, I wish I hadn’t wasted all that time on diets. I wish I had been happy with myself.” 

This poor body image is only advanced by the vast ineffectiveness of social media diets, which focus more on mechanical weight loss than nutrition. Each body is different, and perpetuating an unattainable ideal every year makes it challenging to achieve self-acceptance.

The media is a constant perpetrator of negative body image, and wellness industries don’t have individuals’ best interests at heart. Industries that capitalize off of this need to stop turning New Year’s resolutions from a chance at a new beginning to the repetition of the same damaging cycle.