One of the blogs I'm following in my RSS reader is by the Fat Nutritionist. Her most recent post describes several quotidian food strategies that I agree with, but it also has this:

Plus if I don’t buy a frozen pizza, I will just order one at some point anyway. There’s no point in fighting it.

I just don't get this fatalism around food choices. There are people who go without pizza their whole lives. What's to say that this writer, or anyone else, can't go without it too?

As you know, one of my big complaints with standard RD-licious guidance is that deprivation diets don't work. People just won't stay on a food plan that rules out a person's favorites, they maintain — and so, apparently, does the Fat Nutritionist, a blogger named Michelle who has a nutrition degree but who is not a dietitian.

But it's just not my experience. I have eaten a lifetime's worth of pizza — I just accomplished that feat in half a life. (Going through a trove of personal papers going back to college days recently, I found canceled check after canceled check written to the Hungry Tomato, each one for $2.10, which tells you how long ago my college days are. They didn't take checks, but they took them from me, 'cause I was helping to put their unborn kids through college.)

There is no imperative to eat pizza, or sweets, or whatever — and if there is, it may well be explained by an addiction. (Which is not to say that the Fat Nutritionist is an addict; God no, I would even mildly imply such a thing.) Everyone, unless they have the biochemical sensitivity to a substance or substances that leads to irrational, self-destructive behavior, can freely choose what they put into their bodies, and even those of us who do have the biochemical sensitivity can choose, albeit with substantially more support and structure than others.

I just don't understand the oft-given "expert" opinion that "you're going to do it anyway, so you may as well." It only becomes true if you make it true. 

I acknowledge that for people who aren't food addicts, a good strategy may be to include all the tastes one loves, but in limited quantities. But spreading that philosophy indiscriminately is injurious to people who may never be able to take in those foods safely, but who could die trying.