In the darkest timeline, everybody's on a diet.

It’s that time of year.

Image: "The Holy Kinship", Geertgen tot Sint Jans (workshop of), c. 1495, (detail), Rijksmuseum. Used with permission.

Hiya! I'm going to be brief this week because I know you have many emails about Black Friday to get through.

But this is a warning because it's also the time of year when we all start getting ads and emails about the wreckage of holiday eating and maybe we'd like to think about going on a diet? Tis the season for feasting, and diet purveyors follow a feast like Harriet the Spy follows suspicious grownups.

So I want to offer you an early innoculation against post-holiday diets, aka wild overreaction.

You may have heard: I don't always think losing weight is a dumb idea. But I do think—and science tells us this is true—that dieting is a dumb idea because it's a great way to gain weight. 

To be sure, everyone means something a little different when they say "diet." Some people—food anthropologists, say—mean "what a person eats in a day." (The words "diet" and "day" share a linguistic root.)

People who are selling diets on the other hand—and this includes just about all the big names that you can think of—mean something else. They do NOT mean "guaranteed fastest most reliable way to gain weight!" because you don't want that and they can't sell it.

My definition of "diet" is 

1. someone else's idea of what you should eat 
2. which is most likely less than you need to sustain your body, even at the target weight
3. moreover it is a way of eating that is unsustainable over the long term, either for life, or maybe not even until teatime, depending on how drastic the diet is
4. and it may be drastic enough to provoke survival-panic binge eating
6. thus, it is temporary by design, definition and default
7.  AND, I repeat, this way of eating we're defining here virtually always results in eventual weight gain. 

That's a diet. Therefore: bad idea. Ugh, the essence of the DARKEST TIMELINE. It is a TRAP!

So let's get to what I'm selling you, which is: Not a damn thing. But I would like to offer, freely, for your consideration, the idea that you can enjoy yourself this holiday season in whatever way is available during quarantine without gaining a lot of weight or needing to go on a diet.

The very easiest place to get off that whole wheel of diet-binge-weight gain-suffering is to just refuse to pendulum. I suggest that instead of compensating for a holiday feast, you can just return to a normal day of normal-esque eating. No need to react to anything. Just keep going.

Keeping going is already a lot right now. Even more than is usual at the holidays. Let's all praise ourselves for doing that. 

Wherever you are in the world, I wish you health and happiness for the rest of November, and I'll see you again next month. 

PS  Coming soon: 2021 PLANNERS! I can't wait to start thinking about a fresh start...