A year of self improvement

Diets can monopolise your energy, take up your time and do a number on your self-esteem. They turn your attention inward, on changing your body, not the world. And they have a well-documented propensity to fail, no matter the level of dedication or resolve of the dieter.

But here we are, once again, in the month of New Year’s resolutions; the month where even the staunchest believer in self-acceptance can find herself falling for the pitchmen and the first-month-free come-ons.

This year, the notion of self-improvement feels especially seductive. Diets, and resolutions in general, are all about hope — hope that things can get better, hope that you are going to actually learn that new language, declutter that junk drawer, lose those 20 pounds for good.

Once upon a time, you had to hear diet talk only from your intimates — your co-worker who’d gone Paleo, your grandmother who’d tell you how “healthy” you looked before adding, pointedly, that you could order the salad without dressing. These days, if you’re on Facebook or Instagram or anywhere else, you’re being inundated, not only with paid ads but with updates from your former roommate, your book-club buddy and your second cousin once removed who have decided to post pictures of their workouts or their Fitbit stats. With social media comes curation, and competition,

societally approved notions of what beauty and happiness look like, and the implicit belief that, if you just tried again, tried a little harder, then you, too, would be just as successful as that second cousin you haven’t seen in six years.

It can be hard to say no to the temptation to forswear all temptation. Experts agree, though, that January pledges hardly ever lead to positive, permanent change.

Part of the trick to resisting is just understanding how hard the world is working to influence your thinking. “The only time the fish notices the water is when the water’s gone,” says Bernard Luskin, a psychotherapist who specializes in the impact of the internet and other media on behavior. Right now, we are swimming in a sea of advertisements.

Those messages are coming at us online more rapidly than ever before, and that “intensity and velocity of communication is causing an impairment of critical thinking,” Luskin said.

If you still want to make changes, understand that you are where you are not because you’re weak or you’re flawed, but because you’ve adapted to an environment that encourages you to drive instead of bike or walk, to watch TV instead of doing anything else. It’s a lot for three hours a week of gym time to counteract, Wharton says. His suggestion is to go big. Don’t just swap half-and-half for skim milk, or take the stairs. Reorder your life to reflect your values and your priorities instead of just tinkering at the margins.

Or you could focus on the political instead of the personal. If the weight-loss industry and the fitness industry and even, it seems, the president-elect would rather have you counting calories instead of all the frightening ways the world has changed since November, if they want you spending your money on commercial diet plans instead of giving it to Planned Parenthood, then you can recommit to self-acceptance, and on doing work that will ultimately matter more than the shape of your body.

Personally, I’m planning on taking the money that previous Januarys might have gone to Weight Watchers or the diet book of the moment, and using it instead on bus tickets from Philadelphia to Washington for the women’s march on Jan. 21.

My workout that day will be marching on the mall with my mother and her partner, surrounded by women from all over the country, united in our opposition to a president who routinely engages in the kind of toxic machismo that would get any of my daughter’s third-grade classmates put in the timeout chair.

I will take up space in a world that tells women they shouldn’t and be loud in a world that tells us to be quiet and compliant.

I will work toward better days for myself, for my peers and for my daughters. May their Januarys be about self-acceptance, not self-improvement; may their leaders appreciate women for their talents, not their appearance. May they always understand that, of all the things in the world to change and to fix, the least important will always be their looks.

— New York Times News Service

— Jennifer Weiner is the author, most recently, of the memoir “Hungry Heart,” and a contributing opinion writer