Please do tell me what you are giving up in January. It is endlessly fascinating to have one conversation after another about booze, carbs and hot water with lemon. What a thrill I get when someone I hardly know starts going on about their glowing skin and improved sleep, or thumping themselves along in the dark on hard pavements, or the endorphin release to be had from a cross-trainer (yeah, sure).
Surely the people who will achieve their goals – this entirely atomised version of “taking back control” – are precisely the sort of people who just get on with it? You barely notice them not drinking or not ramming Pringles into their gobs. I am sure a figure can be put on the failure rate of the bangers-on compared with those who don’t say a word, but unfortunately, as I have not decided to become a better person by learning maths, I can’t produce it.
The aspiration to be healthier is a form of self-gentrification. In all our cities and small towns we can see the consequences of addiction: to smack, crack, spice, alcohol. We see it in our hospitals and in the rough sleepers in our shelters, and yet rehabs are closing down or are entirely privatised. Those who most need help are not able to access it and are caught in downward spirals of addiction and mental health issues. This is far more complicated than discussing gut bacteria. (You’ve got some. Eating revolting yoghurty stuff won’t make a lot of difference – but hey, fill your boots.)
This process of eliminating all that is bad from one’s life in order to feel better is just not possible for many people in the way that it is spoken about. We live in a social body, not isolated temples of purity.
If this insight doesn’t clearly demonstrate my own moral superiority, then pretending spirals of shredded courgette are pasta sure as hell won’t.
• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist
