People who weigh their food every day are freaks. Right or wrong?

Right. They’re control freaks. And being a control freak is a good thing when in the past you have allowed yourself to be totally, uninhibitedly out of control. I have been a control freak for the past eight months, and I like it. I like the pleasure of knowing how much I need to eat to keep my delightful svelte figure. I like knowing how much is enough and how much is too much. I even quite like the ritual of it, most of the time.

We are creatures for whom data is important. We measure other things and don’t think anything of it. We know that putting too much oil in our car’s reservoir is not good for it and that too little can be catastrophic. We know with a racehorse we need to give it some exact dietary requirements for it to do its best on the course. But our bodies, the one thing that each of us takes with us from birth to death, are somehow different? I don’t think so.

If the difference between weighing a healthy amount and being too heavy is simply a case of keeping track of the amount I eat and the kind of foods I eat on a day-to-day basis, then I’m going to weigh in on the side of weights and measures. It’s not that hard, and it keeps my eyes on the prize.

When you’re on a diet,  you’re living life in a somewhat stressed state. It’s not just that your body is having to adapt to a lower calorie intake and compensate by using up fat stores. Your whole self is affected. Preparing special meals or measuring your food or choosing not to eat certain things you usually eat without thinking puts you under some degree of pressure. It’s like being a piece of elastic that is always in a somewhat stretched state.

While ever it is a pressure applied evenly, you feel you could go on forever in that mode. But should the pressure increase or decrease too quickly and too greatly, that’s when things are liable to snap. It’s like building up a head of steam. You can operate that way for a certain amount of time and then something has to give.

Unless we want to be on a diet forever, we need to be able to control this step between being on a diet and getting on with ordinary life. And the way to do it is to gently ease the elastic back instead of letting it snap back to its original shape. It’s not only the elastic that reverts to its original shape, unfortunately!

The thing is, we all need a little stress, a little discipline in our lives. So perhaps ‘letting go’ is not the most successful way to end the diet. Perhaps the secret is knowing how far to relax the elastic … so far and no further, otherwise you have to start way back at the beginning again.

Diets that teach you maintenance mode and which really concentrate on it are doing us all a great service. Let the elastic go a little, but keep control of it.

I think we need to get out of the mindset that we ‘go on a diet’ and then when it’s finished we can stop thinking about our intake of food. If we want our big reward of a slimmer body and a healthier attitude to food to stick around, we need to keep up the work that got us there.