A Diet Is A Bad New Year’s Resolution

Primarily because, diets don’t work. As one of my good friends likes to point out, if diets worked we wouldn’t need to keep starting them. And we sure wouldn’t need to create “diet challenges” or set diet “resolutions” to get us “back on track” or “make up for” the food we ate during the holidays.

At the dawn of 2019, “losing weight/getting in shape” was the second most common New Year’s resolution, right behind saving money. Nearly 43% of survey respondents expressed a desire to lose weight, a resolution that consistently sits at the top of New Year’s lists. According to a study conducted by the University of Scranton, just 8 percent of people achieve their New Year’s goals, while around 80 percent of resolutions fail. Aside from the fact that many people quit their resolutions, we consistently make (or re-make) the same ones. Year after year, losing weight and saving money top the list. Albert Einstein said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” Making the same resolutions year after year, and expecting a different outcome is similarly fucking insane.

The most obvious problem with New Years resolutions is that we wait until the new year to make them. If you really want to make a change, you can go ahead and do that anytime. We all like the allure of a new, clean slate, but that…