Yearly Themes and the Year of Nutritional Intentionality
It's early April. How are your New Year's resolutions going?
Odds are, most of them have been in the dust bin for 10+ weeks at this point.
I don't know if it's their idea or not, but CGP Grey and Myke Hurley have been working to popularize the idea of replacing the target-oriented idea of New Year's resolutions with yearly themes.
Starting in Cortex episode 21, and refined over further January episodes, the concept is broad, yet simple. Instead of a typical New Year's resolution, with a fixed goal that, while achievable, can also easily be failed, consider an overall theme for the year that points you in the general direction you're looking to go.
Some of their more common examples include swapping out a resolution to read 30 books this year with a broader Year of Reading, or replacing a firm goal of going to the gym every week with the Year of Fitness. A theme gives you guidance without putting you in the position where an early partial failure dooms your overall resolution and entire year.
Themes give you the flexibility to retune your day-to-day work under the umbrella of your theme without feeling like you're starting over. Maybe you decide blogs or technical journals are more interesting, or you've decided to swap the gym for rucking or weightlifting at home. You're still working toward that same goal, even if you've course-corrected.
While New Year's is a natural time to think about renewals and refocuses and self-improvement, a theme neither has to start January 1, nor does it have to be a year. As noted in the video above, maybe you decide a quarterly or six-month theme is better. Or perhaps you get a few months in and decide the theme you started the year with isn't really working for you at all, and you'd like to pick a different one. That's fine! You can always make those changes, and keep working toward a better you.
Put another way, and borrowing and badly butchering a quote: the best time to start a yearly theme is at the beginning of the year. The second best time is now.
Around the time when I first heard of yearly themes, I got my first Apple Watch. I decided to make my 2018 the Year of Active. I didn't need to necessarily exercise every day, I just needed to generally be more active in 2018 than I'd been in 2017, and the watch helped do the trick.
In subsequent years, I'd dabbled with other ideas for yearly themes, but nothing really stuck. COVID-19 didn't really help matters, either, throwing most folks' plans for how they were going to spend a few of those years straight into the shredder. Finally late in 2024, I got my 2025 theme idea, and started my plan.
For me, 2025 is the Year of Nutritional Intentionality.
I'm well aware that, over my adult life, I've surely generally eaten too much. We all do. I hadn't really run a BMI calculation in years until it came time to dole out COVID-19 vaccines in 2021. While learning that I'd pushed ever so slightly into the "obese" range did help me get closer to the front of the jab line, it's obviously not a great thing healthwise overall. I've decided that I need to be a little more intentional about what I'm eating.
I've read a number of things recently about different nutritional ideas. While there are hundreds (or more) different types of special diets, the simplest concept to work from is "take in fewer calories than you burn". I also got a tip that one great way to control your eating, without having to spend gobs of money on special foods or bespoke meal plans, is simply write it down. If you can see a log of the things you're consuming, even if it's just with a notebook and a pencil, it's easier to see the overall picture of what's going into your body in a day.
Importantly, for now, my I'm not really changing much of what I eat — just how much. For example: I'm still going to have those potato chips. However, I'll have a small, measured bowl of them, instead of housing the entire bag in an afternoon. Sure, I'm adding healthier snacks like carrots and raisins to the mix, too, but I'm not explicitly denying myself tasty things — just reducing the quantity. Also, being a yearly theme and not a hard-and-fast goal, I can allow for special events like holidays and travel, where "nutritional intentionality" can be allowed to mean "I am intentionally ignoring the numbers today", and give myself mental permission to not feel bad about the next weigh-in. That's just the new starting line, and we return to work the next day/week.
Of course, I'm the technologically nerdy sort, so if there's an app that can 1) let me see even more fine-grained data about what I'm doing, and 2) have it feed into Apple Health, I'm happy to give it a try. A number of folks on the various Relay podcasts I listen to use Foodnoms as their nutritional tracker of choice, prompting me to try it out. It has a deep catalog of food items you can add to your daily log via UPC scan, as well as the option — whether it's something homemade, or a meal from a cafe or restaurant — to use a photo and/or a description of what you're eating to ask the Foodnoms AI for nutritional details. It's also able to synchronize with Apple Health and let what activity I do during the day offset calorie intake guidelines day to day, too.
So far, the concept has worked. I've got nine years of intermittently-recorded (as in, "whenever I felt like stepping on a scale and logging it") weight data in my Apple Health. Having taken a reading on January 2, I'm currently down over 16 pounds since the beginning of the year, and am at my lowest point since before those nine years of data started. I do have a few goal weights in mind, but since this is a theme and not a resolution goal, I'm not tying them to time. It's no problem if I'm not at one of those numbers by the end of the year; I'll have still developed a year's worth of healthier eating habits, and I can continue to work toward those goals the following year.
Please note: I'm not a dietician. I bear no responsibility if you try this and it doesn't work for you. I'm only reporting what I did for myself.