January is the time we seek dietary inspiration online.

But, it is also the time that we need to know we’re not alone in our failings.

Started my diet today and just ate a tub of Ben n Jerrys. I'd say it's going well — Hol Wilson (@HollyWilsox) January 7, 2017

The Brandwatch React team has dug into the data on New Year diets and we’re here to help.

Talking about your diet

The team looked for instances of people talking about their diets across social media from the beginning of the year to the 15th of January. For example, we searched for strings of text like (my NEAR/1 diet*), which incorporates mentions of “my diet” as well as “my awful diet” or “my vegan dieting.” We excluded retweets to stop popular dieting tweeters taking over the conversation, as well as filtering out repetitive mentions across the web.

We found over 20k mentions, and were surprised to find “pizza and beer” as a trending topic. It turns out that’s what Ed Sheeran’s diet consisted of before he lost 3-stone and made his come back.

“My diet was pizza and beer, but because I was doing two hours a night I was really in shape. I stopped touring and carried on my diet of pizza and beer. Suddenly I didn’t fit in anything. I was like, ‘All my clothes have shrunk’.”

Whether you think it’s braggy, inspirational or downright wrong, lots of people take to social media to share their healthy lifestyles (or at least what they want to share about them).

Breaking your diet

As well as the more positive sides of healthy eating, social media users also appear happy to admit when they screw up their dieting plans.

We’re sorry, but not at all surprised, to report that this is happening.

To get a better idea of what this meant, we decided to search our dataset for mentions associated with beginning a diet and ending, cheating at, or breaking a diet. It turns out that people have been talking about messing up their diet since the 1st of January, but mentions peaked later in the month.

That said, mentions talking about starting their diet peaked later than we’d have expected. Perhaps there was a lot of Christmas food left in the refrigerator this year.

This kind of data could prove useful to personal trainers and healthy food outlets – if your social campaign didn’t work out so well on the 1st of January, perhaps giving it a second boost a week later could give you some better results.

Likewise, with the knowledge that dieters appear to struggle around 11th January, crafty fast food outlets might be able to score some extra custom with a timely offer on social media.