LOL! Are you a human or a mouse? ;)

Since we're humans, we have intelligence. We can think. We can tell time and delay gratification. We can buy and stock our own food instead of being limited to what the lab gives us. We can reprogram ourselves, our tastes, our habits. I'm sure the solution varies from person to person, though, so you'll probably have to figure out what works with your body.

For example, I weaned myself off of soda and juices to water gradually. Going from soda to juice was easy for me: Odwalla was very tasty. Then, I started watering down my Odwalla. At first, I started with a 50/50 mix, but then I found that I needed less and less juice for the drink to still taste good. Eventually, it just wasn't worth the effort or expense to add that little bit of juice to my water. (I'm lazy, and I've been very effective in using my laziness to help me lose weight and become healthier.)

I also started thinking about the taste of my food instead of scarfing things down in front of the TV or while working. I avoid eating at times when I'm not able to enjoy the taste of my food. Once I started thinking about how my food actually tastes, I realized that junk food is actually inferior. For example, I can get cheap potato chips, but they just don't have the depth of flavor of Kettle Bakes. However, the Kettle Bakes I like are expensive and hard to find. I promise to buy myself Kettle Bakes once in a while, and that prevents me from craving the cheaper potato chips. I earn my own money, and I deserve better than those cheap chips.

Once I discovered taste, I started cooking my own food (which led me to eat a lot of raw vegetables because I'm too lazy to cook them), and I realized that all restaurants overcook foods drastically, which renders everything tasteless, and then they inundate everything in greasy, salty, and/or sugary sauces to make up for it. It started programming into me the idea that the taste of salt, sugar, and grease were the taste of the inferior. In particular, the tastes of table salt and refined sugar are very simplistic and don' t have depth or complexity. I replaced salt with herbs and spices, and I replaced sugar with fruits.

Once I've upgraded my normal food, my tastes got very picky, and junk food (chips, cakes, cookies, fast food) started tasting very boring. If I'm eating junk food, it means that I've failed to plan ahead so badly that I don't have something tastier with me (like unsalted nuts or a piece of fruit). Basically, I created many layers of counter-anxieties that overrode my addiction to junk food. I'm very cheap and lazy, but I've developed expensive tastes, which turned out to be great combination of vices for losing weight improving health.

I completely agree that restrictive eating doesn't work. However, many studies are now saying that lack of physical activity isn't the problem, and it doesn't have all that much to do with weight. (However, physical activity is still very important to health. Health and weight are not the same thing, and I would bet that they're significantly less related than we're led to believe.)

I'm a fan of IMPROVED eating, and it has worked wonders for me. A lot of studies are coming out saying that calories are NOT all created equal. In retrospect, this should've always been obvious: how could people ever have thought that eating 2000 calories of refined sugar per day is going to have the same effect on a human body as 2000 calories in balanced meals?

Also, we're slowly learning that the human body is insanely complex. Breaking things down into fat vs protein vs carb was far too simplistic, and there are "good" and "bad" varieties of everything (such as omega-3 fats vs. trans fats and refined carbs vs. whole grains). Furthermore, everything needs to exist in balance in a human body. When we start distilling and extracting and packaging "super-nutrients" from foods in an attempt to pack in the nutrients, we find that ingesting so much of it causes other problems, and then we put it on the "evil" list again.

We need to keep in mind that more of a good thing isn't always better. Sure, a piece of chocolate is divine. Apparently, a few dozen pieces of chocolate makes people addicted. A few thousand pieces of chocolate will probably make even the most avid chocolate lover very sick. So, the trick might be to find that balance between "divine" and "addicted". To make things more complex, I'm sure it varies from human to human, so science probably can't figure out what this "sweet spot" (haha) is for any particular person. It's something that each individual needs to discover for themselves. Some people might be addicted with just one bite, while others may never get addicted. Furthermore, I'm sure that balance changes over the course of an individual's life, so it's something that needs to be constantly monitored and re-checked.

So, while I'm completely against restrictive diets, I strongly urge people to take a good, hard look at what they eat and to make sure that they eat enough foods with a high nutrition density. Unfortunately, the food industry and even the FDA has either been utterly clueless or outright lying to us about what "nutritious" is, so it's actually a hard thing to do, and reading labels or popping vitamins is not enough.