3. Your body tells you what it needs. Diets teach you not to listen.

Eating is not a learned skill; it's an instinct. You weren't born with a calorie calculator, but with a natural sense of when you were hungry and when you'd had enough. As a child, you discovered which foods you liked, which you hated, and how much you could eat before you got a stomach ache. Food was just food. You didn't know if an apple was good, bad, or an extra-special treat until someone told you it was. Eventually, we all hear those messages, because we live in the world, not some food-neutral Utopia. But, living in the diet cycle is like joining a charismatic cult. The leader promises salvation, so you do whatever that person says ("Thou shalt eat only raw until 4 p.m.!"). You surrender your own instincts to follow the leader's, and soon enough, you're officially brainwashed. 4. Dieting makes food the center of your life.

When you're on a diet, you're constantly thinking about food: What should you bring to work for lunch? How will you handle dinner with friends? Can you get through your sister's wedding without going over your carb limit? Food shouldn't be the subject of those sentences. Your work, your friends, your sister's wedding — those are the things that matter. With all that needless focus, it's no wonder that food becomes so much harder to handle. But, what and how we eat should simply be the fuel that feeds our lives. Food shouldn't be the best thing or the worst thing and certainly not the most important thing. Your sister's wedding is not about the cake.