| | | It seems like everyone I know is doing a 30-day challenge right now. Some of my friends have temporarily given up alcohol for Dry January, or "Drynuary." Others are doing Whole30, which means that in addition to not drinking for 30 days, they can't eat bread, beans, sugar, or a whole host of other foods. The proliferation of "new year, new me!"-inspired challenges has sparked a debate among my friends: Does giving up alcohol or beans or sugar or whatever for a month actually change anything? Do 30-day challenges matter if, once the month is up, you immediately go back to your unhealthy ways?
As EJ Dickson explains, these challenges can work, but it ultimately depends on what your goals are. You may not be able to change your entire life in a month, but temporarily altering your habits can help you reevaluate them later on. And, of course, it helps to have a challenge that's aspirational but not unreasonably restrictive; cutting back on sugar for a month is a lot easier to stick to than an unhealthy juice cleanse, after all.
—Gaby DelValle, reporter for The Goods | | | |
| It is January, which means Girl Scout cookie season 2019 has officially begun, an annual tradition in which brigades of girls in earth-toned uniforms hawk boxes of cookies to family, friends, and strangers. But unlike most fundraising efforts — National Public Radio, for example, or elementary school wrapping paper sales — Girl Scout Cookies are beloved. They are beloved like apple pie is beloved, or puppies. Girl Scout Cookies are a triumph: of marketing, of cookie baking, of youthful entrepreneurship. Between February and April every year, Fortune recently reported, the more than 1 million scouts in the US sell about 200 million boxes of the cookies. It is an $800 million business. How much is that, in cookie terms? It's more than Oreos, Fortune says. It's more than Chips Ahoy and Milano sold combined. It is a staggering number of cookies. For general comparison's sake, the entire population of America is only 325.7 million. Are we that excited about young women selling things? Are Trefoils that good? What is going on? |
| The first time Jenny Kutner decided to do Whole30, it was in October 2016, right before the presidential election. An elimination diet program created by a husband-and-wife team, Whole30 encourages people to give up alcohol, dairy, grains, legumes, and sugar for exactly 30 days. Toward the end of the 30 days, you're supposed to slowly reintroduce these foods into your diet, to identify which ones work for you on a regular basis. But the day the diet ended, Donald Trump was elected president, and "I reintroduced tequila immediately. Then I ate candy for breakfast," Kutner said. "And I just kept eating like shit for two years, because we live in hell." So this January, she decided to redo the Whole30 diet as a way to improve her overall health. If you spend an unhealthy amount of time tapping through former co-workers' and high school crushes' Instagram stories, you've probably noticed that an awful lot of people are doing Whole30 this month. The Whole30 diet has been criticized for being too restrictive (as it turns out, a lot of foods that taste good have sugar in them!), and it has not yet been subject to peer-reviewed research. Nonetheless, it's won over dieters on Instagram, who have posted 3.9 million #Whole30 photos of vibrantly hued cauliflower steaks and pesto chicken-stuffed sweet potatoes. Whole30 is incredibly popular as a New Year's challenge, with searches spiking every January over the past five years, according to Google Trends. Ashleigh Morley, a branded content director who had her first baby last year, decided to try it this January with her husband, partially as a way to shed the weight she'd gained during pregnancy. "We were honestly just eating like crap over the holidays, so in early December we both agreed to try Whole30 as a way to eat cleaner in the new year," Morley said. "The overall goal is just to make more mindful, healthy decisions after this." She's been documenting it on social media to help keep her accountable, and so far, she says, it's been working. But Whole30 is far from the only 30-day New Year's challenge out there, and not every New Year challenge focuses on diets. Even a brief perusal of social media during the month of January will yield hashtags for 30-day fitness challenges, vocabulary building challenges, sobriety challenges, journal-keeping challenges, and even sex challenges. |
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