The ONLY Foolproof New Year's Resolution You Need to Get Healthy

Welcome to 2022!

If you’re like us, then your 2021 must have gone a little something like this: good, bad, ugly, fantastic, terrible, more terrible, then slightly better only to end up in limbo. The normal reaction someone would have after such a turbulent year is to set intentions, otherwise known as New Year’s resolutions: lose weight, get a better job, spend less, commit to a productive routine, be open to new interests. However after careful consideration, and seeing how our past resolutions were pretty much forgotten about or given up on by the time spring showed up, we have found that the concept of New Year’s resolutions might be a little archaic and could do with some change.

When you set your heart on achieving a specific list of things whose results are requirements of outside sources like societal beauty standards and secure profit, it doesn’t surprise us that 90% of resolutions fail.

Enter mindful & intuitive nutrition: It’s the powerful realization that the brain controls hunger and metabolism. You’ve probably heard this one before, because we were all taught that in biology 101. But what we were definitely NOT taught was that the healthiest possible way you could have a healthy relationship with food is to listen to your hunger cues and your intuition and to stop restricting certain foods from your diet just because they were previously labeled as “bad”.

To be clear, intuitive eating isn’t some new-age reverie. You are now living in the age of appetite! We hope you’re ready to settle down and listen to your body’s cues and your innermost cravings. You will finally get to close your ears to all the outside cacophony telling you who to be and what to eat. It’s not going to be easy, because we have all been fed the same labels regarding food since we became self-aware of how we look and feel. We just have to unlearn the past, and re-learn to understand our body’s signals.

Your body is intelligent. It is an incredible machine wired just right that is constantly working to heal you. So give yourself permission to eat whatever you want, as much as you want, and take notes on what makes your body feel good. After all, intuitive eating does start with rejecting the diet mentality. Trust your body to tell you when, what and how much to eat. Honor your hunger to keep yourself biologically fed and make peace with food. Nevertheless, you also need to look out for fullness. Feel the signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry and stop eating. Discover the satisfaction factor, which simply means don’t order the salad if what you’re really craving is the pasta! Don’t finish eating a food if it doesn’t taste that great to you, and don’t force yourself to eat something if you’re not hungry even if it looks very appealing.

Learn to differentiate between actual hunger and emotional eating by honoring your feelings and finding ways to comfort your issues without using food, because eating for an emotional hunger will end up making you feel worse in the long run. Let food be only for enjoyment and not for distracting you from your emotions. However if you do identify as an emotional eater, know that you’re definitely not alone in this and never stand in judgment of yourself.

Respect your body by quitting the comparison game. Your body is always deserving of care and respect, so give up on chasing an “ideal” body because health is not determined by body size. If everyone in the world ate and exercised the same amount, we would still have different body types. When you stop trying to make your body smaller, you will have the freedom and time to find out what it really feels like to be healthy in the unique body that you have. Exercise and movement don’t have to solely be a tool to earn the food you want to eat or burn off what you’ve already eaten. In reality, they can be a tool to add dimension and joy to your life but only if you let go of this perfectionist mentality.

When all is said and done, it all comes down to honoring your health with gentle nutrition, forgiveness and joy. We’ve been saying it all along: joy is nutritive, joy is healing, joy is nourishment.

Now get out there and stay focused on progress, not perfection! Be proud of yourself for how hard you’re trying. When you focus on the good, the good gets better.