The One Food That Knocks Everyone Off Their New Year's Resolution Diet

Every January 1, we awaken to face the raw, gray daylight of a new year, determined to make some changes and to finally follow through with our New Year's resolutions. "This year, it will be different," we seem to always say. This is the year that we're going to get our lives together, take our relationships to the next level, make that gutsy career move we've been promising ourselves, or move out of our parents' finished basement.

For many of us, this first step toward an improved life begins with a promise to stop treating our bodies like a burning dumpster fueled by cardboard Big Mac containers. "I'm going to go to the gym two, no, THREE times per week, and I am going to replace at least one meal per day with raw kale seasoned only with lemon juice and fish scales," we bargain with our broken bodies, still battered and reeling from the revelries of the previous night.

And it may go that way. At least for a while. But eventually, a food comes along that we find so irresistible, that we throw all of our good intentions out the window, put on a stained pair of pajama bottoms, and settle in for a heavy dose of comfort food and a four-hour block of Law and Order reruns. Here are the foods that most commonly knock us off our New Year's resolution diet.

Chinese food can be tricky, because it can seem on the surface like it may not be super terrible for you. "After all," you may find yourself rationalizing, "It's mostly vegetables, right? What's a little cornstarchy brown sauce between friends?"

Unfortunately, Chinese food also tends to contain uber-high levels of salt and fat, particularly in the deep-fried dishes, and is loaded with MSG, which is thought to make us overindulge and turn "just one egg roll" into 25 paper cartons of food. MSG is a way of boosting the umami factor in our foods, that same "fifth taste" that makes meat, mushrooms, and some types of fish delicious, and which makes a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos seem as close as man has come to developing a scientifically perfect foodstuff.

Couple the near-irresistibility of Chinese food with the fact that we tend to order it late at night, when we're not moving our bodies much, and the fact that we can have it delivered right to our houses without ever leaving the couch, and it's easy to see why a few forkfuls of sweet, crispy General Tso's can be a real resolution-breaker.

If you crave huge heaping bowls of spaghetti carbonara, pasta putanesca, or fettucine Alfredo within days of setting your new year's resolutions, it's probably not your fault. Your lack of self-discipline isn't due to your father disappearing with a Denny's waitress when you were in the fourth grade... it's because you have a complex carbohydrate sensitivity. See? Science!

Turns out, some of us tend to crave carbohydrates more than others, and have us dreaming of heaping plates of lasagna while we should be eating chilled radish salads, thanks to our bodies' increased ability to taste and enjoy the sugars in carbohydrates.

"What that could mean is that individuals who are more sensitive to the 'taste' of carbohydrate also have some form of subconscious accelerator that increases carbohydrate or starchy food consumption," says to Russell Keast, a researcher at Deakin University in Australia who is studying the link between carbohydrate craving and consumption. "But we need to do much more research to identify the reason why."

'Betcha can't eat just one, amirite? Junk-food aficionados worldwide understand the allure of potato chips, and why it can be so ridiculously difficult to crack a fresh bag with the best of intentions, only to find themselves buzzsawing through the entire sack and involuntarily falling into a Cool Ranch coma a few minutes later — New Year's resolution be damned.

Potato chips feed our bodies' natural cravings for salt, but it turns out the satisfying CRUNCH of a potato chip may also be a component in their appeal. According to Mental Floss, the crunch of a chip may reach 63 decibels (for reference, a human conversation registers about 20 decibels), the sound reverberating along the jawbone and into the inner ear in what researchers call, "the "music of mastication," an auditory accompaniment to the sensory stimulus of eating. And when we hear it, we eat more, because we associate crunchiness with freshness and nutritionally rewarding foods... and because we want to hear it again.

If you're ready to enthusiastically abandon your good intentions for the new year, a freshly-baked bagel is the perfect way to do it. Whether you take your bagel plain or toasted, buttered or slathered with habanero whitefish cream cheese, the allure of a hot, crusty, chewy bagel can prove impossible to resist. Squint your eyes tightly enough, and you might be able to convince yourself that a bagel is no more or less healthy than similarly carb-heavy breakfasts, like an English muffin or a piece of toast. But hooboy, would you be mistaken.

The average deli bagel clocks in at around 350 calories, and about 50-60 grams of carbohydrates, which is the equivalent of three or four slices of bread. Add a pound of bacon cheddar horseradish cream cheese to the mix, and it's easy to drive the fat and calorie load to unconscionable levels. Use a bagel as a base for a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, and you might as well start reinforcing your bed slats with rebar, pricing out Rascal scooters and widening all of your door frames now, because your resolutions are history. Better luck next year.

We Americans love our cheese. But according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (via One Green Planet), we're eating entirely too much of it. "Americans eat more than 33 pounds of cheese per person per year — three times more than they did in 1970 — and our country is more obese than ever ... Cheese is a high-calorie product loaded with fat, sodium, and cholesterol. Typical cheeses are 70 percent fat. And the type of fat they contain is mainly saturated ("bad") fat."

Cheese intake is at an all-time high, with chains like Domino's Pizza leading the charge into our high-cholesterol, obese futures. According to an article published in The New York Times, when the company tweaked its pizza formula to include 40 percent more cheese on their pies, business boomed... but so did our waistlines. Just one slice provides two-thirds of the recommended daily allowance for saturated fat, which sounds like the most delicious way to break a resolution we can think of.