Before Everyone Resolved to Lose Weight: Meaningful Resolutions of Yore

[xchrom]

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/before-everyone-resolved-to-lose-weight-meaningful-resolutions-of-yore/282742/


New York City Mayor Ed Koch tests the Big Apple Ball in 1981. (AP/Lederhandler)

"Did you make any New Year's resolution? Of course you did! Who doesn't? There is something irresistibly magnetic about the first day of the New Year — something that compels a new channel of thought ... One looks back with regret for the things that might have been done, and deplores things that have been done, and forthwith makes a resolution to remedy the omissions this year."

So wrote a reporter, who seems to have been getting paid by the word, for the British Exeter and Plymouth Gazette on January 4, 1913.

This year, most Americans will resolve forthwith to do some permutation of "getting fit" or "losing weight."

But New Year's resolutions predate our modern-day weight concerns by centuries.