Nutrition-Focused New Year’s Resolutions
As 2025 wrapped up, it’s hard not to notice the flood of social media posts from everyone around you. Family, friends, colleagues – even those random acquaintances popping up due to some algorithm magic. They’re likely sharing reflections on the past year and, of course, their hopes for the coming one. This year will be different, they say, and it’s like déjà vu because… well, didn’t last year’s posts say pretty much the same thing? You might have even posted something similar yourself.
One of the most popular resolutions revolves around improving physical and mental health. People often vow to work less, get more sleep, bike more often, and eat healthier.
Yet, there’s a catch. Just like many overly optimistic plans, these resolutions often don’t hold up when faced with reality. Those couple of weeks of dreamy aspirations in December fade quickly as February rolls around, revealing the sobering truths that were glaringly obvious in hindsight but somehow overlooked at that moment.
This article aims to explore nutrition-related resolutions and offer some suggestions that might help you stick with your dietary changes through to March.
What’s the goal?
Here’s where things start to falter. We tend to set ambitious, often unrealistic goals regarding our eating habits—something many of us do. The top nutrition-related resolution, whether you’re a cyclist or not, is usually weight loss. Some set reasonable targets, while others dream of being as lean as they were two decades ago—before kids and a sedentary job, of course.
Regardless of how ambitious you feel, I propose that aiming for weight loss might not be the best strategy for making meaningful dietary changes, and here’s why:
- Being leaner, and becoming leaner, are two very different things.
Some people seem naturally slim, regardless of what they eat, while others struggle. The focus shouldn’t solely be on getting leaner but rather on the challenging process many must undergo to achieve and maintain that condition.
Maintaining a caloric deficit can lead to various physiological and psychological effects, which become more pronounced with aggressive or prolonged deficits. This might affect your bike performance due to inadequate nutrition for your training, or even contribute to health issues across different athlete demographics, often referred to as Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (REDs). This can manifest as bone density loss, disrupted menstrual cycles in women, decreased testosterone in men, among other things. Although there’s been much discussion about REDs and cyclists recently, I’ll spare you the details here. If you’re not familiar with the topic, this brief video featuring Georgie Howe from Escape Collective provides some useful insights.
Keep in mind, this isn’t just a concern for elite athletes. Any significant imbalance between training efforts and caloric intake can lead to similar consequences, and I’ve noticed variations of this across riders of all ages, genders, and skill levels.
