Why do we have to do this every single January and start a new year by beating ourselves up?
For the first few days of the new year, I have seen and heard on TV & social media how we need to get back on track from the holidays and shed that weight! What if we choose not to do that to ourselves this year? Haven’t the past two years been hard enough? Having a kinder outlook on the new year and not berating ourselves up for enjoying the last two months of the year sounds great to me! So, what if you ate what you wanted and didn’t work out as much or even at all. Did you get to spend time with the people you love, the family and friends that you haven’t seen in two years? That is what’s really important, the human connection we share, not the food.
I am no stranger to setting a New Year’s resolution. Every single year around the holidays I would indulge, it was my excuse to loosen the reins and eat all kinds of foods that the other ten to eleven months of the year weren’t allowed. Come January I would complain that I gained my annual holiday 5-10 lbs and beat myself up and go back to restriction.
We ALL know this shame and guilt all too well and I would like to propose that this year 2022 is the year where we are genuinely kinder to ourselves, especially our bodies. If you could stop and think for a moment what they have been through since March of 2020, maybe we could all realize how strong and resilient our bodies really are and having some holiday treats is perfectly acceptable. We aren’t bad people because we indulged.
Setting goals for our bodies in the new year is not a bad thing and feeling good in our bodies takes effort on our part. Moving our bodies is a wonderful form of therapy and it can be done with a positive intention, not punishment for the past few weeks of 2021. Maybe this year when we set our goals on how we are going to work on ourselves we look at the whole picture, body, mind, and soul.