Every January, we collectively decide that our bodies are projects. Renovation sites. Before-and-after opportunities. Suddenly, everyone is “starting fresh,” “cutting carbs,” and “resetting” like their insides are a faulty router that just needs to be unplugged and plugged back in.

Meanwhile, I’m standing here, looking at myself, thinking: My body is a temple.
Not a sleek marble Greek temple, mind you. More like a cozy, slightly chaotic sanctuary devoted to a great, fluffy, adorable panda bear. One that naps often. One that eats enthusiastically. One that has no interest in burpees.

On bad days, I feel less like a temple and more like a bouncy house with a ball pit, where I store all my spare parts. Things bounce and jiggle when they shouldn’t. There are mystery items I don’t remember acquiring. Somewhere inside, a whistle is constantly blowing, and I’m not sure why.

And yet, this is the body I live in. Not just in January. All year long.

Which is why I’ve decided that weight loss and “getting healthy” as a New Year’s resolution is… flawed. Not wrong. Not bad. Just deeply misunderstood.

Because being healthy shouldn’t be a resolution. It should be a lifestyle. One that exists regardless of what page the calendar flips to.

The problem is that we’ve turned health into an event. A dramatic kickoff. A “starting Monday” situation. We treat it like a limited-time challenge instead of a long-term relationship. And when it inevitably gets hard, boring, inconvenient, or expensive, we assume we’ve failed rather than recognizing that real health is built in the unglamorous middle.

Also, can we talk about how absolutely overwhelming “getting healthy” has become?

At this point, living a healthy lifestyle feels less like a personal choice and more like a subscription service. There are plans. Programs. Coaches. Apps. Powders. Shakes. Bands. Mats. Shoes that promise to fix your knees, hips, posture, and possibly your childhood trauma. There are workouts for people who hate workouts, workouts for people who love workouts too much, and workouts that require equipment you don’t own and joints you no longer possess.

Everywhere you look, someone is selling the right way to be healthy. And it’s never cheap.

Which brings me to one of life’s great injustices: eating unhealthy is still cheaper than eating healthy.

This makes no sense.

Highly processed food, engineered, packaged, preserved, shipped, and marketed, is often less expensive than… plants. Bunny food. Greens. Bird seed. Items that literally grow out of the ground. How is a dollar-menu cheeseburger more affordable than a salad made of leaves and seeds that required minimal manipulation?

Somewhere along the way, health became a luxury product. Organic costs more. Fresh costs more. Time costs more. Knowledge costs more. And the message becomes quietly cruel: if you’re not healthy, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough, or spend enough.

That’s nonsense.

A healthy lifestyle doesn’t require perfection. It doesn’t require a gym membership that costs more than your car payment. It doesn’t require kale that was massaged by monks under a full moon. It requires consistency, kindness, and realism.

It requires acknowledging that bodies change. Metabolism slows. Energy fluctuates. Life happens. Stress eats your best intentions for breakfast. And sometimes dinner is whatever didn’t require an extra stop.

Choosing health, then, isn’t about punishment or restriction. It’s about respect.

Respect for the panda temple.
Respect for the bouncy house.
Respect for the body that has carried you through decades of living, loving, worrying, laughing, surviving.

Health isn’t about becoming someone else by February. It’s about making small, sustainable choices that don’t vanish when motivation does. Drinking more water. Moving in ways that don’t make you hate yourself. Eating better most of the time without demonizing joy, comfort, or the occasional drive-thru.

It’s about ditching the all-or-nothing thinking. Because nothing derails progress faster than believing that one “bad” meal means you might as well burn the whole plan down.

This year, I’m not resolving to lose weight. I’m choosing to continue to take care of myself, not because it’s January, but because I live here. In this body. I am the panda. This is my ball pit of spare parts.

And temples, no matter how fluffy, deserve care year-round.

So that is what I am going to do this year. I am going to stop treating my body like a problem that needs solving, because even pandas know that wellness involves snacks, naps, and zero interest in hustle culture.