Is It Okay to Set New Year’s Resolutions In Eating Disorder Recovery?
A New Year is often thought of as a fresh start or a new chapter of your life. New Year's resolutions generally focus on behavior changes, with hopes to improve physical and/or mental health. We are expected to come up with new year's resolutions and try to stick to them. Setting goals and trying to achieve them is admirable. However, when recovering from disordered eating, this can be challenging.
By: Elizabeth Low
It is difficult to follow New Year’s resolutions at any time of your life, especially if you are in recovery from an eating disorder. Eating disorder recovery involves a lot of hard work to undo behaviors and ways of thinking that may feel hardwired into you. If there are setbacks, this can be discouraging. Difficult circumstances such as experiencing significant changes in your life, trauma, or being in the third year of a global pandemic can make implementing goals challenging. You may have additional stress if you do not adhere to your resolutions like you thought you would. It is important to assess your intentions behind making these goals. Are you making new year's resolutions because you feel you have to, or do you genuinely think you need a change?
Hearing other people’s resolutions may be stressful if you are working on recovery. According to a CBS News poll, “losing weight or improving health” is the most common resolution for 2022. When we hear our family, peers, and co-workers talk about their journey with weight loss, this can bring up feelings of discomfort with our body image or eating habits.
New Year's resolutions often fall into two categories: avoidance and approach goals. Avoidance goals intend to minimize or stop behaviors. In the context of eating disorder recovery, an individual may aim to stop checking the nutrition label for the calorie content of foods. Approach goals focus on adding behaviors, for example, devoting time to adding fear foods back into one's diet.
A 2020 study showed that approach goals were easier to follow than avoidance goals. Generally, people were more likely to add behaviors rather than remove them. 58.9% of people who made approach goals succeeded in keeping them compared to 47.1% of people who successfully followed their avoidance goals. This study also highlights that some support from others and accountability increased success in New Year’s resolutions. With this in mind, you might want to look at reframing your goals into manageable approach goals.
It may be helpful to set resolutions based on disordered eating recovery. However, recovery is not linear, and sometimes, you can regress. This is normal. Most importantly, be compassionate with yourself. If you need to amend your goals or start over later, you are still trying to recover from disordered eating, which will be worth all the effort.
At BALANCE eating disorder treatment center™, our compassionate, highly skilled team of clinicians is trained in diagnosing and treating the spectrum of eating disorders, including anorexia, bulimia, binge eating disorder, compulsive overeating, and other disordered eating behaviors and body image issues. In addition to our full-time Day Treatment Program and Weeknight Intensive Outpatient Program, we offer high-quality programming, nutrition counseling with a licensed dietitian, meal support, and various other groups and resources to help those seeking help for food concerns.
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This post was written by BALANCE Blog Contributor, Elizabeth Low.
Elizabeth is currently finishing her sociology degree with a concentration in social interaction and a minor in psychology at San Jose State University. During her undergraduate studies she has volunteered and worked in childcare, and in the food industry. She plans to pursue a graduate degree in Clinical Nutrition or Counseling. She hopes to actively counteract social messaging that is linked to disordered eating, overexercise, and body dissatisfaction. Her interests include cooking, childcare, education, research, and writing. She plans to help individuals have a healthy relationship with food and their body image through counseling in the future.