I spent a diligent lifetime trying to lose weight in the correct way, informed by all the current knowledge about diet, weight, and food. I didn’t follow nutritional fads. I ate a balanced diet. I used the recommended methods–journaling, counting calories, making sure I got a balanced distribution of nutrients, planning my meals, and exercising moderately.

I was successful in losing weight.

But I was, unfortunately, successful repeatedly, because the weight always came back after a while.

I am incredibly disciplined. Massively. So I would lose weight steadily and sensibly. And then, a year or so in, the diet would stop working. I would stop losing weight, even on the same amount of food. And then, I would get hungry. Terribly hungry. Obsessed with food. I would start to binge.

I really, really didn’t want to spend all my life thinking about food. I had better things to do.

So several years ago I declared war on conventional wisdom. I stopped being sensible. I stopped being disciplined. I ate whatever I wanted.

It isn’t easy to give up caring about something society treats as a moral issue. You’re supposed to care deeply about food and weight. Luckily, I am, by inclination, a contrarian, so I just added dieting to my list of things I wasn’t going to go along with.

For the first year or so, therefore, I ate all the ice cream I wanted, and a great deal of ice cream I didn’t want. I also stopped weighing myself. I stopped reading nutritional information on packaging. I didn’t listen to my body’s fullness signals. If my dinner was a bunch of crackers, cheese, and a banana eaten at the kitchen counter because I was starving, so be it.

Oddly enough, these days, I realize just now that I mostly end up eating at my dinner table, with a pretty plate, a cloth napkin, and a nice glass of ice water, but that’s just because it feels nice.

Did it work? That depends on what you mean by “working.” Yeah, I gained weight, because of course I did.

But then, after a while, something odd happened: I stopped gaining.

Every time I went to the doctor, I dreaded what I would discover. And then they would weigh me, and it would be the same amount as the year before. My blood work would be the same. My clothing size didn’t change.

So it sure didn’t mean I was miraculously skinny. But I was miraculously okay.

Honestly, I like food a lot more now that I’m not denying myself. That’s good, because I am old and have a much smaller appetite, and it would be too easy to forget to eat, if I didn’t actually like food.

Yeah, I’m thick in the middle, and I would rather not be. But I’m about to turn 74, and from what I can see, everyone my age does not actually look sixteen, even with repeated surgery, even with dutiful abstention. In fact, quite a number of the people my age who looked the best are dead now, because they died of things you can’t prevent by being a saint.

No, I just get to eat what I want. And it turns out, that is a very sensible diet indeed.