Dieting ''Cold Turkey''

A couple of decades or more ago -- when I was a kid -- my father smoked. Two packs a day, in fact. Non-filters. Pall Mall, as I recall.

And then, one day, he stopped.

He just threw the pack out and never picked them up again, never looked back. Cold turkey. No tapering off, no escape routes, no exceptions. No patches, no antidepressants, nothing. Threw them out, kaput, endgame. He genuinely believed that the way he did it was the only way to go. (This, after all, was an era when painless dentistry had not yet been invented.)

We now know, of course, that while that's certainly one way to stop smoking, there are other ways to do it. They may not be such clean breaks, but they may ease the pain of withdrawal a bit (or prolong the agony, depending on how you look at it), and, in fact, there is a now an entire menu of possibilities when it comes to stopping any addiction. Programs, discussion groups, 12-step models, psychotherapy, patches, prescription drugs, you name it.

But food is a different animal. The alcoholic, the drug addict and the nicotine addict all have one thing in common. They can live without their drug of choice. (Whether they are able to is a different story.) But food? Ah, now you're in a whole different galaxy. You can live quite nicely without alcohol, cigarettes or drugs, but you cannot live without food. Unlike the craving for alcohol, the craving for food -- hunger -- will not go away, and if you ignore it long enough, you die.

If this weren't bad enough, even if you did want to quit the bad foods cold turkey, how do you know which ones they are? Should you be giving up fat? (The answer is no.) Carbohydrates? Sugar? Calories? Which is the demon? We're told to eat a ''balanced'' diet (one of dumber platitudes of the last few decades) but there is no agreement among experts on what the word ''balance'' means.

There's a reason the old saying ''Keep it simple, stupid'' has been around for ages, and it's this: When it all seems too complicated, too impossible, too overwhelming, the very best thing you can do is go back to basics. Focus on eating the unprocessed, basic foods that have been around the longest -- I'm talking millions of years, not decades. Make most of your choices from meats, fish, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and fats. With everything else, proceed with caution.

Although it's comforting to have someone else tell you exactly what you can and cannot eat, and how much, it ultimately doesn't work. You have to figure it out for yourself. Each person's constitution -- metabolically, genetically, hormonally, ethnically, physiologically, psychologically -- is completely unique, so much so that following a pre-formed dietary strategy is almost always a doomed enterprise. There is no getting around the individual detective work that has to be done, but there is also no denying the absolutely certain benefits of such an approach. You find out what works for you. You find out how much of the ''bad'' foods you can tolerate and still lose weight. You find out how many calories your body needs (not your neighbor's, yours). You find out which foods drain you of energy, which ones give you ''brain fog'' and which ones improve your mood and make you feel great.

Is this harder than throwing away a pack of cigarettes and never looking back? I think it probably is.

But if you want a better body -- and far more importantly -- a healthier and happier one, it's the only way to go.

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