Now is the time of year to come up with new year’s resolutions: make some decisions now that will make the twelve months to come healthier, happier and less stressful. The few days between Christmas and New Year give you the chance to look back and look forward and come up with some changes that will make for a better life in the new year.
Many people falter because they choose sweeping changes to their lifestyle which are hard to maintain. Trying to change too much at once is almost impossible: your willpower is a finite resource and stretching it too far will break it. If you resolve to be fitter and healthier starting on January 1st, and hit the gym for seven days a week, you’ll soon burn out your will to keep going, if you don’t do yourself an injury.
Start with smaller changes, or at least temper your most audacious aspirations with easier to achieve goals that can reward you with a dose of comfort as well as the satisfaction of fulfilling your aims. We’d suggest one of those should be giving up high heels.
It’s easier than giving up than smoking, makes you far more comfortable and could have some real benefits to your health! As well as the foot pain that the perfect pair of four inch heels can bring, there are wider, longer term issues: heels force your spine out of alignment, pushing your chest and lower back in opposite directions. This creates a traditionally feminine posture, at the expense of the risk of long term back and neck pain, which is far from a fair price to pay.
We appreciate that sometimes formal situations carry a dress code with them: you can’t wear a pair of women’s sliders everywhere, however comfortable they might be!
That doesn’t mean it’s time to give up on your resolution though – there’s plenty of flats available in styles across a whole spectrum of professional through to quirkily stylish, and you should be able to find something that fits the bill. If your flats really are persona non grata, that suggests the event itself needs challenging: any dress code that asks you to put your health and comfort on the line in favour an inflexible image of how women need to dress is, for one thing, almost certainly organised by a man who won’t be wearing heels anyway, and for another unacceptable in 2018.