New Years’ Healthy Resolutions and How Fake Food Plays a Role
What will 2025 bring for you?
According to the Cleveland Clinic (1) , the top five New Years Goals are are:
Eat healthier · 2. Work out more · 3. Drink less · 4. Manage stress · 5. Quit smoking
Not too surprising, giving the landscape of our current society. But how long have these goals been so popular? And why do they remain popular? In other words, why are we setting the same goals year after year?
Let’s take a little peek back in history.
The ancient Babylonians are said to have been the first people to make New Year’s resolutions, some 4,000 years ago. They were also the first to hold recorded celebrations in honor of the new year—though for them the year began not in January but in mid-March, when the crops were planted (2).
By the 17th century, New Year’s resolutions were so common that folks found humor in the idea of making and breaking their pledges. A Boston newspaper from 1813 featured the first recorded use of the phrase “New Year resolution.”
The article states:
“And yet, I believe there are multitudes of people, accustomed to receive injunctions of new year resolutions, who will sin all the month of December, with a serious determination of beginning the new year with new resolutions and new behavior, and with the full belief that they shall thus expiate and wipe away all their former faults.” (3)
“Sin all the month of December”’; sound familiar? At least as it pertains to making intelligent food, exercise and overall healthier-for-you choices?
I was curious to find out a bit more about whether or not there was any correlation between when people began setting resolutions such as these and when the diet culture was born.
Turns out, there is.
Dieting in the U.S. began in earnest in the 1830s, with the emergence of Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister who was strident about the hazards of eating processed flours and who developed one made from the entire wheat germ, not just the endosperm (4).
Back then, most people were considered to be a healthy weight, as little as one century ago, obesity was considered rare (5), now were are nearly 75% of our population in the US is classified as obese!
Several diet trends followed from the Banting Approach, Weight Watchers, Atkins and Beverly Hills Diet, only to name a few.
The obesity epidemic began in the 1970s and was formally recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1997; The prevalence of obesity in American adults (age 20–74, both genders) rose from 15.0% in 1976–1980, to 23.3% in 1988–1994, and to 30.9% in 1999–2000.
Right around the time something notable occurred; in the 1980s, tobacco giants Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds acquired the major food companies Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco, allowing tobacco firms to dominate America’s food supply and reap billions in sales from popular brands such as Oreo cookies, Kraft Macaroni & Cheese and Lunchables (7).
New research, published in the journal Addiction, focuses on the rise of “hyper-palatable” foods, which contain potent combinations of fat, sodium, sugar and other additives that can drive people to crave and overeat them. The Addiction study found that in the decades when the tobacco giants owned the world’s leading food companies, the foods that they sold were far more likely to be hyper-palatable than similar foods not owned by tobacco companies (8).
The findings suggest that tobacco companies engineered processed foods to hit what is known as our “bliss” point and elicit cravings, said Ashley Gearhardt, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who studies food addiction.
And there is it.
Simply put, once we humans began consuming things that were not longer fresh, nutrient dense food, but packaged items engineered with chemicals designed to override our natural satiety cues, we unknowingly signed up for a fast track to obesity and a plethora of related dis ease.
Understanding this is step number one, deciding to make change is step number two.
It is indeed not about positioning it to yourself as going on another diet, but choosing to honor your body by feeding it real food.
By discontinuing the support of the big ‘food’ companies that do not have any of our best interests as their priority.
By opting to place importance on where you are buying your food and how it is prepared.
By no longer putting shopping and cooking on the same list as scrubbing the toilet and mopping the floor.
This is something about which I’ve been passionate about my whole life, but now as a mom, especially as a mom in 2025 when obesity and sickness are growing like wildfire, plastic is polluting everything and our topsoil is so depleted we cannot rely only on real food to provide us with the minerals we need.
But- and here’s the but – the future is not bleak, it is bright. As more of us wake up and begin to tune in (we don’t need to go to a doctor to be told to do this) and listen to the remembering that we have deep inside, we create a limitless brightness.
Eat locally, eat in season and eat in color.
Don’t eat things in packages and certainly don’t eat ingredients you cannot identify as food.
Get outside more, sit less and move your body temple every day. Rest more. Do less and BE more.
New Year’s Resolution? All of the above, and for the most important WHY of all – our future truly depends on it.
What we weigh IS important, of course it is. It’s just not the only thing.
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/common-new-years-resolutions
https://www.history.com/news/the-history-of-new-years-resolutions
https://www.almanac.com/history-of-new-years-resolutions
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/the-seesawing-history-of-fad-diets-180981586/
https://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/metabolism/obesity/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9611578/
https://lsa.umich.edu/psych/news-events/all-news/faculty-news/many-of-today-s-unhealthy-foods-were-brought-to-you-by-big-tobac.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction-foods-hyperpalatable-tobacco/
