Right then! Here we go again, eh? Another year: another chance for a fresh start and another set of resolutions. Or, at least, that’s what tradition dictates. Personally, I’ve always found the idea of making New Year’s resolutions to be somewhat silly.
Now, before you go taking that as a license to keep on bingeing and lazing your way through the next year, let me explain myself. I always feel that if you want to make a change then you should do so as and when you feel ready – at whatever time of the year that happens to be. The notion of suddenly turning over a new leaf on midnight of the 31st December is quite appealing, I grant you. There’s definitely a neatness to tying your life to the calendar like that. And there’s a certain charm to the fairy tale quality of it – when the clock strikes 12 you become a new man. Yes, I like that a lot. But the fact is that it rarely works. This is because the approach is far too contrived and we generally can’t sustain the dramatic changes that we optimistically impose on ourselves.
This is particularly the case with health and fitness resolutions. It’s all very well to do Dry January and give up booze for the month, but most people just return to their old ways in February and carry on exactly as they were. It all seems a bit pointless to me. OK, you’ve given your liver a rest, you’ve had a detox and you’ve done a bit of a re-set. But you haven’t made a fundamental change to your habits, have you? Surely that’s the more important thing? A token month of abstinence followed by eleven months of indulgence is nothing but a sneaky little means of appeasing your guilty conscience....
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