The very worst writing resolution you can set for 2025

And what to do instead--that's right, it's a community-wide 30-day challenge!!!! [jazz hands]

Fresh out of college, I worked at Self Magazine, then a glossy magazine in Conde Nast’s chic Times Square office. And as a wee editorial assistant there (a million 15+ years ago), I wrote an article that felt revolutionary at the time. The headline was something like: Non-Scale Victories.

Health magazines like ours were obsessed with weight (and, specifically, losing it) at the time (Father, forgive me for I have sinned…). I edited a steady gush of “weight-loss success stories” (complete with before-and-after photos), and article after article promised to help you “shed pounds” and “torch calories” and the like.

What does “Peel Off Pounds” even MEAN!?

But this article was a revelation: real women sharing the health accomplishments that had nothing to do with taking up less space. I can do a pull-up now! I got my cholesterol levels in check! I can watch my grandkids for hours without wanting to pass out from exhaustion!

Okay, I don’t remember the exact non-scale victories, but you get the point—instead of focusing on the number on the scale, we encouraged readers to measure “success” (a squishy concept already, right?) by something other than total pounds, ie, the force exerted on the mass of a body by a gravitational field. Wow! I thought. We can give that stupid metric the middle finger!? My 23-year-old mind was blown.

Since then, I’ve developed a general distaste for numeric goalposts (and the attendant black-and-white thinking). Calories are a hackneyed way to think about your daily food consumption, and the 2,000-calories-a-day guideline is, to be frank, bullshit. While walking is terrific, pedometers can make 9,999 steps feel worlds away from 10k.

Virginia Sole-Smith

blew my mind with a podcast episode titled, “Budgeting is diet culture for your money.” I even bristle at “how many books I read this year” posts. (200+?! Do you have a body double?!?)

What’s with our cultural obsession with numbers? What if the most important things in life—peace and joy and progress and, I don’t know, touching grass—can’t be quantified?

And that brings me to the Get It Write January Challenge: