New Year’s Resolutions Shouldn’t be Punishments

New Year’s Resolutions should not be motivated by worth-based body image issues, nor as punishment.

Our motivation is everything when it comes to health and nutrition-based New Year's resolutions.

I think resolutions can be a nice thing; they can help us muster up our imagination, think more deeply about what we really want and what we value in our hearts.

We might realize we are compromising being vegan for the sake of what others think, and that doesn't feel true to our values.

Or we might decide that in our hearts we've always wanted to try dancing, and this is the year to do it, not only because it's good exercise but because we love it in our soul.

We might decide we are going to love our bodies more by doing more advanced food prep of healthy food so that we have options when we are busy.

I personally intend to drink a lot more water as my resolution!

The best motivation for a resolution would be to think of habits that are sustainable long-term (I'm talking decades) and that are motivated by a love for your body on the inside, not just on the outside.

In other words, resolutions should be about what's good for your heart health, digestive health, kidney health, etc., not just how you look on the outside.

Most of all, New Year's resolutions should not be made from a place of self-loathing, toxic body image issues, body dysmorphia, or any kind of harshness.

They should not be a way you're saying to yourself, "You're not good enough. You're not love-able. And your body is why, so you WILL change this in the new year."

They should also not be a punishment for how you've been eating recently, where you're tempted to whip yourself into shape with something extremely harsh in order to compensate.

If your motivations for New Year's resolutions have anything to do with harshness, self-judgment, self-hatred, please take a pause.

If you are deeply embedded in the emotional injury of feeling your worth as a human or deservingness of love and respect is in any way tied to your weight, please look at whether you're acting from this place.

The problem is that making plans from this place will likely backfire and create more overeating and perpetuate yo-yo cycles.

The even bigger problem is you wouldn't be being kind or loving to yourself.

You'd actually be damaging your own soul and your relationship with yourself if you were to use resolutions as a way to perpetuate low self-worth beliefs and what would likely be re-creating cycles of worth and punishment and perfection that you were taught in your childhood.

If these are feelings you have, my suggestion is this: don't make resolutions. Not those kinds anyway, and not in those areas of life.

Instead, maybe your resolutions could be to:

-Be kind and gentle with yourself with regards to your eating and body

-To heal body image issues and find where they came from

-To have the courage to explore what happened in your childhood to create these issues in the first place

These would be much more fruitful and self-loving types of "resolutions".

Photo by Kat Smith via Pexels