New Year’s Resolutions and Binge Eating

With a new year, we make new resolutions to improve our lives. A New year, a new you. Right?

In 2020, almost 30% of Americans will make a New Year’s resolution and 50% of those people will make a health-related resolution such as exercise more or diet.

In January the gyms are packed, exercise equipment is sold out, personal trainers are slammed and Weight Watchers meetings are shoulder-to-shoulder full. January is a time when many try to purge what happened in December.

December‘s Christmas advertisements turn into January‘s weight loss ads, hoping to capitalize on all the desperate people trying to lose weight.

We start out gung ho in January and by February we’re back to our old ways.

Why do new years resolution diets fail?

The New Year’s resolution diet failure is really no different than any other diet failure. It’s just such a popular thing to do that It has a name associated with it.

With the binge eating holidays behind you, the shock sets in on your weight gain. You are determined to turn it around in January. This is the year you finally lose all the extra weight.

January starts and you begin the good fight. You use all your willpower to stick to your diet of choice. Things go well for maybe a few weeks or a few days. Your mileage may vary.

But willpower is like bad weather, it doesn’t last very long.

You only have a finite amount of willpower every day. You use it up and it’s gone. The rest of the day you’re in the danger zone of binge eating.

The root cause of the problem is you haven’t dealt with your binge eating problem before you started a diet.

When your hunger drive is always on it will be very difficult to maintain any diet. Your always-on hunger drive is what causes binge eating. For more information on this see my cornerstone article on why you binge eat.

You are constantly fighting your inner thoughts to maintain your diet.

You see yummy food and you have an internal struggle to not eat the yummy food. This struggle in your head lasts seemingly forever. It certainly lasts longer than if you just ate the yummy food.

The more you try to stay on your diet the stronger the feelings get to eat the yummy food.

If you run out of willpower, then lookout! You will eat the yummy food. And when you're done with that yummy food you will find and eat more. Within a few minutes, you will have consumed mass amounts of calories.

But, at least the internal struggle is over. But… the damage is done.

This is binge eating.

If you don’t fix your binge eating problem before you start your diet of choice you will fail! See my article on how to stop binge eating forever.