After the excesses of Christmas we’re firmly into dieting season as people search for ways to shed those extra pounds and promise to get back into shape.

With New Year’s resolutions being swung into action, between 1 January and 8 January UK Internet visits to dieting websites increased by 47%. What is unusual about this year is that there was a big spike in interest in dieting long before New Year’s resolutions were being made, and in fact there was a 112% increase in visits to dieting websites in the week before Christmas Day (25 December).

As we get closer to New Year interest in losing weight and dieting always picks up but in previous years it has always been the first week of January which sees the biggest uplift in traffic, not the week preceding Christmas. In particular this year there was a 141% increase in traffic on Christmas Eve (24 December) which is out of character with previous year’s trends. This is perhaps an indication of a nation trying to be a bit healthier over Christmas and not maxing out on the monstrously unhealthy Christmas food sins.
Although visits to dieting websites saw big uplifts in traffic pre-Christmas, searches for dieting terms and all search variations for weight loss terms saw their biggest increases in volume in the first week of January. I’ve separated out three main variations of search terms, one which includes all ‘diet’ terms, one which includes all ‘weight loss’ terms and one which contains all terms for ‘lose weight’.

By far the most popular search portfolio was the one containing ‘diet’ terms, which in the week ending 8 January saw three times the volume of searches of either ‘lose weight’ or ‘weight loss’ variations. What’s interesting here is how the ‘weight loss’ portfolio has traditionally attracted more searches than the ‘lose weight’ portfolio, but during December 2010 and January 2011 ‘lose weight’ has seen more searches overall. This just goes to show how search patterns and trends can change over time.
A big part of dieting is clearly involved with working out how many calories are in various foods. As with searches for dieting and weight loss, the peak of the year for searches for calories is in January. The interesting insight to take from the graph below is that searches for calories in “good foods” (fruits, vegetables, fish etc) are almost exactly equal with searches for calories in “bad foods” (chocolate, pies, curry, wine etc).

The only break from this trend seems to be in mid-November and early December when searches for calories in bad foods exceeds those of good foods. Last year at the peak of calorie-related searches good food searches outstripped bad food searches, and this may well prove to be the case again this year when the peak reveals itself in the next couple of weeks.
These trends are reflected in our individual keywords tool which allows us to see how often a certain keyword appears in all of the variations of a particular term. In this case, I’ve taken the word “calories” and looked at the individual keywords that appeared for the week ending 8 January.

Of all the searches performed during that week which contained the word ‘calories’ 2.92% of them also contained the word ‘chicken’. Chicken was the therefore the most popular search variation for calorific content.
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