
Happy New Year to our Untamed community! We hope that you had a joyous holiday season. By now, it’s likely you have been inundated with email after email, advertisement after advertisement, encouraging you to “start over” and embody the “new year, new me,” mentality. While the idea of a fresh start can be liberating, the underlying tone of most New Year’s resolution messages is that in order to feel good, you have to completely overhaul your life, i.e., “It’s all or nothing!” This idea could not be further from the truth.
In fact, according to Traditional Chinese Medicine, the season of winter is actually intended to be a time for rest, reflection, and energy conservation. The cooler temperatures and darker days remind us of the importance of staying in, slowing down, and leaning toward rest. So, if you’re not feeling particularly inspired to take on a new project or hobby, Chinese medicine practices (and me!) would tell you that’s a very natural feeling to have. And for the record, rest is important year-round!
While Western culture tends to focus on the calendar months and designates the month of January as an arbitrary time to recreate yourself, I would argue that trying to change ourselves, our habits, and our motivations overnight is not only unrealistic, but can cause more harm than good.
Imagine if as a child, you simply woke up one day and decided to try and learn how to ride a bike all on your own - in only one day. Without any support and guidance from others, patience, consistency, or time, you would’ve likely made some attempts to ride the bike, fell, crashed, and felt defeated after just a day. This feeling would prevent you from trying again, causing you to miss out on the JOY of riding a bike!
Healing your relationship with food, body image, and movement does not happen overnight. Like riding a bike, it takes small, gradual shifts over time - and not without bumps along the way. Growth and healing are not linear, which means that we don’t always grow in a positive direction each day because some days we have setbacks. No one is perfect, and as humans we are likely to make mistakes in pursuit of trying new things. Once we accept that imperfection is a normal aspect of the human experience, we can learn to grow from setbacks and choose to keep moving forward despite them, rather than stopping altogether.
I like to call this choice, “resisting the all-or-nothing mentality.” When we give ourselves grace to not be perfect all the time and accept the fact that healing is a journey that has both highs and lows, we are then really able to pursue the best versions of ourselves. So if you’re feeling overwhelmed from the new year’s marketing, remind yourself that your journey does not have a deadline, and it doesn’t follow a calendar (unless you have an appointment with us 😉). You have the freedom to make your own choices at your own pace, and we are here to support you along the way! Wishing you a healthy and happy rest of 2025.
-Written by Hanna Spevak, Practice Manager at Untamed Nutrition Therapy
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