Are you someone who loves the week between Christmas and New Years’? Filled with reflection and a fresh feeling and the urge to clean your house and feel inspired. It often feels like FINALLY you can pause and think about the past year, to think about what went well and what didn’t. To think about how you want to grow, how you want to better live out your values, to ponder how you’re doing in your job, with your health. To sit and reflect on your dreams/desires/hopes, aspirations, hobbies, relationships, etc.

Or maybe you aren’t currently feeling the magic of fresh starts. Maybe the ‘New Year Energy’ is a reminder of the ways you feel ‘wrong’ in this world. Or the promises you’ve made to yourself that you couldn’t keep, no matter how much money you spent or habit trackers you filled out or times you read ‘Atomic Habits’ or juices you bought/concocted.

Just like so many other areas of life, diet culture sinks its teeth into the new year freshness (as we see with ‘New Year, New Me’ claims, ‘Dry January’, ‘No Added Sugar’, ‘Whole-30’, the list goes on).

In a Forbes survey of 1000 adults in the U.S., over ⅓ stated ‘lose weight’ as a resolution for 2023.

This post-holidays time is saturated with messaging that ‘Your body is wrong. Fix it and you will be seen and you will belong.’

What does it look like to enter the new year and set goals with a HAES lens or a lens of freedom. Of permission. Of grace. Of trying softer.

Let’s just throw a couple of truths out there:

Your body is not a project
The diet industry makes money on you being dissatisfied with your body
You have the right to not pursue health, whatever health means to you (but you absolutely CAN)
While we’re on the subject, health DOES NOT equate to morality

So let’s name a few goal/intentions/resolutions that aren’t weight-focused:

Work on seeking healing in your relationship with food, exercise, or your body
Find and grow in a spiritual practice
Pick up a new hobby each season (i.e. banjo, puzzles, coloring, watercolor, etc.)
Start going to therapy this year
Increase instances of self care (maybe this looks like a hot baths, journaling, a hot cup of tea before bed, making a playlist of cozy songs,
Start taking classes in something of interest (swimming, tennis, piano, ballroom dance, etc.)

I’m going to be the voice to say this today:

You don’t have to make a single intention.

You can just be.

You can breathe in and out and let this transition go by without a single goal or change.

And that is okay.