Resolutions have been a huge part of welcoming in the new year for decades now. Tons of people try to set and achieve goals for themselves and their overall well-being, which can be a great thing. However, this very common resolution can be extremely unhealthy for both your physical and mental health. Every year thousands of people include healthy eating or weight loss/gain in their list of resolutions. While this could be a great goal and beneficial to your health if done correctly, this popular resolution also stems from diet culture and can lead to more negative feelings about your body. This resolution could even lead to eating disorders like anorexia or bulimia.

A New Year’s resolution is a goal people make that they want to achieve for the year. Some popular ones include saving more money, spending less, learning a new skill, quitting smoking, drinking less alcohol, and reading more. However, the top three resolutions have nearly always been as follows: exercise more, eat healthier, and lose weight. Typically, there’s also a large jump between the number of people with these resolutions and the number of people participating in any other less popular resolution. These three resolutions have stayed the most popular for decades—but is it a good thing?

Diet culture is a prevalent issue anywhere you go, and I consider it to be one of the biggest plagues of our society today. In this day and age everyone, especially teenagers, sees all sorts of models, celebrities, and influencers who edit their photos unrealistically. Things as innocuous as filters can be damaging to many young adults. There are also tons of ‘wellness’ influencers who promote things that are quite unhealthy—like extreme dieting. On many social media platforms, it’s also not uncommon to see people romanticizing things like eating disorders and making them seem like a solution to all of the insecurities people may have about themselves. The number of people struggling with eating disorders increased by 107.4% from 2018 to 2022, and social media is easily one of the reasons for this huge exponential increase.

This, of course, isn’t to say that weight loss, healthy eating, and exercise are unhealthy. When done right, these could benefit physical and mental health. However, it’s most important to approach dieting or a weight change in a healthy way, and if you do want to lose weight you should try to maintain a balanced diet rather than a solely ‘healthy’ diet. 

Though there are healthy ways to diet, these types of New Year’s resolutions often do more harm than good possibly resulting in an eating disorder. An eating disorder is an unhealthy relationship with food. You could be avoiding food, or you could be binging frequently. Some eating disorders include anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, and ARFID. Most people fail to realize that excessively checking the scale, eliminating carbs and fats, and exercising are all mentally exhausting, even if you are losing weight. The most important thing about weight loss is to maintain your physical, mental, and emotional health. 

Before you make weight loss one of your resolutions, you should consider your current mental health, the reason behind choosing this resolution, and how realistic your goal is. If you are already in a poor head space, making a slow-moving commitment like weight loss could have extremely negative effects and lead to disordered eating. If you want to lose weight because your doctor thinks it would be good for you, then, by all means, go for it. If you want to lose weight for yourself, that’s fine too. However, your mental health should be a priority above weight loss and if you feel that you’re entering dangerous territory, you should stop. Also, it isn’t good to set a specific goal like losing 100 pounds before a certain time because this could be unrealistic and cause you to start using unhealthy methods to achieve the goal, possibly leading to an eating disorder. 

As we’re into the new year, it’s important to make sure your resolutions are safe and won’t have any negative consequences. This year, change your resolutions to things like ‘maintaining a balanced diet’ instead of ‘lose weight’, or avoid anything along the lines of weight loss completely if you don’t think your mental health is in a good enough space to make this a healthy goal.