The Healthy Programmer

Individual Tastes Over Predefined Menus

The best way to guarantee that a diet plan fails is to eat foods you don’t like. A healthy diet isn’t a short-term fix to an overeating problem—it’s what you eat everyday for the rest of your life. It needs to be pleasant.

If you’ve been rotating through the fad diets listed earlier in the chapter, then you’re off to a good start. But after a while, you’ll probably want to settle into something on a long-term basis. The fad diets should have given you a good sense of what works, what’s enjoyable, and what’s sustainable, but they probably don’t amount to something you want to do forever. Instead, you can use what you’ve learned from those diets to create your own set of rules.

Rules prevent us from ...