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Food

Your Healthy Eating New Year's Resolution Is Totally Backfiring

A new study shows that despite increased sales in healthy food after the New Year, most people are just piling it on top of all the other garbage they eat.
Hilary Pollack
Los Angeles, US

Enter a holiday party on December 18th-ish, and you'll see hordes of merry Brie-gobblers and nog-swillers—and likely, a fairly barren gym down the block. An entire ham roast is quickly annihilated. Sugar cookies are inhaled. Mid- to late-December is the ultimate time realm of maximized caloric destruction.

But come the first two weeks of January, conversations between your adult siblings and coworkers (and, yes, you) are suddenly peppered with claims of trying to "get back in shape" and "eat right." Your daily midday meal of a Double Whopper may have magically reincarnated itself as a chicken caesar salad (for the time being) topped with edamame or quinoa or some other superfood-ish thing that you read about on the cover of Shape at the airport kiosk. You may pat yourself on the back for doing things like ordering a soy latte (soy is automatically better than dairy, right?) or buying expensive Icelandic sheep's milk yogurt.

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But it's time to give up. You're definitely lying to yourself. In fact, you're probably being even more of a glutton in January than you were last month, despite your newfound goal of looking like a yoga instructor.

A recently published study conducted by the Cornell Food and Brand Lab—titled "New Year's Res-Illusions: Food Shopping in the New Year Competes with Healthy Intentions"—aimed to uncover the real changes in food-purchasing habits that take place following the holidays (and their accompanying New Year's resolutions). Researchers followed 207 households in upstate New York and their grocery shopping between July and March of 2010-2011. They then examined whether purchases qualified as "healthy" (carrots?) or "less healthy" ( … ranch dressing?) and looked at the overall pattern of calorie consumption during the holiday and post-holiday time periods relative to the more typical-eating times of year—late summer, for example.

Basically, shoppers still pile potato chips and gingerbread scones right on top of their triple-washed baby kale.

What they found was that during the holidays, we buy 15 percent more food stuffs—75 percent of which was basically edible garbage. And, to our credit, we buy 29 percent more health foods after New Year's. So all's well then, right? And the pounds are just melting away? Well, not so fast.

The sneak attack here was that sales of junk food stayed high even after the holidays were over. Basically, shoppers still pile potato chips and gingerbread scones right on top of their triple-washed baby kale. So after the New Year, the average number of calories purchased each week hovers at more than 9 percent higher than during the holidays, and a disconcerting 20 percent over food spending in the off-season.

It's cold, and we're all stuck inside, and it's almost award season, so Netflix catch-up can be argued to be mandatory. But if you're going to chill out with a bowl of onion dip resting on the belly protruding from your unbuckled jeans, at least be honest with yourself and don't bother piling a bunch of spirulina on top of it. It's just making things worse.

You might as well wait until March, have a total panic attack about your "bikini body," and self-loathe then, when release from our Stay-Puft-style puffy jackets becomes more imminent.