BURLINGTON, Vt. – Despite all the talk of New Year’s resolutions lately, a new study seems to show that there’s more talk than walk when it comes to healthy eating post-holidays. Led by a team from the University of Vermont, the study finds that Americans actually buy more food and more total calories during the days after the holiday season than they do during the holidays.

Researchers tracked grocery spending for 200 households in New York State, looking at three periods: "pre-holiday," from July to Thanksgiving; "holiday," from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day; and "post-holiday," from January through March.

The investigators found that compared with pre-Thanksgiving habits, food spending shoots up by 15% during the holiday season, with most of the extra calories entering the home in the form of junk food. More surprisingly, the study also found that food purchases continued to rise after New Year's Day, jumping another 9% over holiday purchasing expenditures during the first two months of the new year.

"People start the new year with good intentions to eat better," lead researcher Lizzy Pope, of the University of Vermont’s department of nutrition and food science, said in a news release. "They do pick out more healthy items, but they also keep buying higher levels of less-healthy holiday favorites. So their grocery baskets contain more calories than any other time of year we tracked." 

The study findings were published recently in the journal PLOS ONE.