Bored of lunch? Self Help and Healthy Eating take a smaller slice of the pie

January may be a time of forming new habits and making lifestyle changes – whether physical or mental – but one thing that never changes is that those resolutions lead to big sales in certain categories at the beginning of each year. The start of 2025 has been no exception, with three out of the top five bestselling books helping to inspire us to become better versions of ourselves over the next 12 months.

The biggest of these is Nathan Anthony’s Bored of Lunch: Six Ingredient Slow Cooker, which promises easy-to-follow, calorie- counted recipes – good news for both dieters and anyone who got themselves a new slow cooker for Christmas. In the past three weeks, Anthony has sold 30,137 copies through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market, bringing in sales of just over £300,000.

Anthony was also the biggest seller in the equivalent period in 2024, when Bored of Lunch: The Healthy Slow Cooker Book moved 110,340 copies, raking in £1.1m. Part of the reason for this vast difference in sales is that the latest instalment in Anthony’s collection of cookbooks was first published at the beginning of December  2024, some four weeks earlier year-on-year.

That £800,000 difference accounts for the majority of the overall year-on-year change in the categories we’re looking at – which in 2025 have delivered £11.6m, £975,000 lower than the first three weeks of 2024. BookScan’s Food & Drink: General and Health, Dieting & Wholefood Cookery categories delivered a combined £4.5m – down from the £6.3m they earned in 2024.

This seems to continue to follow the trend seen throughout 2024 of Non-Fiction’s deep range declining significantly year-on-year. Excluding the Anthony frontlist titles, food and drink categories have dropped 18.3% since 2024, which itself was 1% lower than 2023.

Excluding the Nathan Anthony frontlist titles, food and drink categories have dropped 18.3% since 2024

The large decline from the food and drink categories is partly offset by a stellar performance in the Popular Psychology category, which is led by James Clear’s Atomic Habits – the second bestselling book of the areas of the market we’re looking at. Atomic Habits was first published in 2018, and with an RRP of £17.99 it has notched up a total of £8.2m.

While leading the category, Clear isn’t responsible for its growth – so far in 2025, Clear has accrued £242,446, slightly down on 2024’s £264,683. Instead, two new titles have delivered 99.7% of the category’s £515,318 uplift: Dr Rangan Chatterjee’s Make Change That Lasts and Julie Smith’s Open When…

The Family & Health category is another area that has performed well this year. Two titles from this list have sold more than 10,000 copies in the first three weeks of 2025 versus none in 2024.

Jessie Inchauspé’s The Glucose Goddess Method and The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt are worth a combined £403,495, accounting for more than half of the category’s performance in the past three weeks.

The Glucose Goddess Method was originally published in 2022, but has experienced a boost in 2025, having sold 10,000 more copies than it did in 2024, largely thanks to a new Channel 4 series starring Inchauspé.

Another area performing well in 2025 are those focusing on new jobs and business, with Simon Squibb’s What’s Your Dream? having sold 10,062 copies in just three days on sale within the analysed period.

To booksellers on the front line, it might feel as though a month that is normally dominated by self-help books and healthy eating guides has seen a shift in focus. While the numbers slightly support this – 11 titles in 2025 have sold 10,000 copies or more, versus 13 in 2024 – the average of these biggest-selling lines is down just 5.3% if the Anthony titles are excluded.

Perhaps the lack of a runaway success at the top of the chart is contributing to that perception, but the growth of other genres in 2025 – Fiction titles in the top 50 have seen a 13.9% rise in volume – means that the mix of Non-Fiction sales has decreased. In 2024, Non-Fiction titles were responsible for 51.3% of the total volume of the Top 50, but in 2025 that number has decreased to 44.9%.