New Year's Resolution: Daily Small Dose of Comfort Food After Healthy Meal

Developmental psychologist Robert Kegan has said that being a better citizen of the world in the 21st century "requires us to have a relationship to our own reactions, rather than be captive of them". I would argue that the same is true for us to improve how we take care of ourselves. Ignoring our survival instinct for sugar, fats, and satiety leads to thinking that at the New Year or some other tortured moment in our lives we can simply start eating healthier. The result is that every New Year we will repeat our annual pattern of failure in recognizing how powerful our survival instincts are. Instead of working with our survival instinct by feeding it small doses of comfort foods after eating a healthy meal containing vegetables, our tendancy is to go cold turkey and then fall off the wagon. Back and forth indefinitely.