The January Reset Trap: Last Supper Eating, Fitness Talk, and Food Gifts from Friends
Dec 30, 2025This week’s Full But Not Finished podcast episode answers three listener questions related to New Year resolutions (about eating healthier or "better"); fitness talk in spaces where you are just there to feel good, not burn the Christmas calories; and receiving edible gifts from people who have restrictive eating patterns.
Let's introduce them one by one...
1) What happens when the New Year fantasy turns into Last Supper eating?
The listener question reads:
There’s an unspoken belief that everything is about to get stricter, more controlled, more disciplined, and that belief produces urgency around food. People start eating as if something is being taken away, even if nothing concrete has actually changed yet.
That urgency isn’t about willpower. It’s about the nervous system bracing for deprivation. It’s about trying to get as much pleasure, comfort, and relief as possible before the clamp comes down.
So why do we keep doing it if we know it happens over and over??
The episode unpacks why that cycle keeps repeating every year, and what it looks like to step out of it.
2) How do you keep movement supportive when fitness culture keeps pulling it back into body control?
This question reads:
My fitness instructors telling us to come "work off the Christmas calories." Movement is my stress-free activity and I just don't want to hear diet culture during my "me time." Also: how can we find more inclusive, weight neutral spaces to work out?
A lot of people genuinely like moving their bodies and then find themselves in spaces where every class is framed around burning calories, shrinking, earning food, toning and lifting, blah blah blah.
Over time, that language changes how movement feels in your body. What could be regulating starts to feel like another place you’re being evaluated.
In the episode we talk about how to recognize when a space is making movement harder instead of easier, and what it looks like to choose environments, instructors, or routines that let your body stay more settled instead of more vigilant -- and how to handle it if you can't.
3) What is actually happening for you around food gifts from friends who eat restrictively?
The final question (which I personally loved!) was...
Food as gifts – they are normally ok but from a certain friend it drives me crazy. I feel super resentful, like RAGE. She's very controlling around her food and exercise and I feel like she enjoys watching others eat. I think it makes her feel better. I feel empathetic towards her and am typically there to support her but I hate it when I feel used. Foods I can normally feel regulated around, I just want to chuck them out. Urgh. How to deal with food gifts? Is it selfish or ridiculous that I feel used??
Food gifts, especially from people with complicated relationships to food themselves, often carry more than just the food. Sometimes they come with pressure, unspoken rules, or a sense that you’re being pulled into someone else’s coping system.
In the episode we slow that down and look at how to notice the emotional layer without shaming yourself, how to separate the food from the charge around it, and how to set boundaries that keep your own recovery and nervous system from getting scrambled in the process. Oh -- and why your reaction doesn't mean you are selfish, lacking compassion, or "ridiculous."
