I’ve already talked about the human taste for drama, a characteristic that draws us into all sorts of extravagant and unsustainable announcements and commitments. The inherent weakness of drama as a long-term tool for change is this:
We think that the dramatic and public announcement (“I’m going keto!” “I’m joining a gym!”) will do the work for us. Now, to be clear, we don’t necessarily believe this consciously. If someone asked us, “Do you honestly think that saying you’re going to lose 50 pounds will somehow make you lose 50 pounds?” you’d say, “Of course not! What kind of nitwit do you take me for?” But we’ve all done it, haven’t we? We say, or think, “I have to do something about this! I’m going to . . . “ And the momentum carries us along, for a little while. Once that initial excitement wears off, though, so does our motivation. And what is motivation, anyway? Gretchen Rubin has a great article on her blog about this whole question. Sometimes when people use that word they really mean “desire”–”I want to do so-and-so.” Sometimes it means “reasons why”–”I know why I need to quit staying up late to play video games.” Sometimes it’s a statement of some kind of vague moral impulse–”I should spend less money on impulse buys.” As she puts it, people aren’t really motivated by motivation. That’s a tautology, in which you just go around in circles: “I’m going to do something because I’m motivated to do it and so I will do it because I’m motivated.” As I’ve said myself before, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” That’s what a lot of so-called “motivation” is—a wish. As the estimable Gretchen points out, you need a clear aim and and plan of action, not some vague motivation.
I plan to do a series of posts on some of the fad diets floating around out there, many of them on celebrity websites, but today I want to write in more general terms about what guides the food choices that many people make. Let me say a couple of things first:
I have a subscription to the New York Times mainly because of Melissa Clark, a cookbook author and food writer who is absolutely the most charming, delightful, quirky, quirkily delightful, delightfully quirky . . . well, you get the picture. I periodically go onto 
First, some catch-up info: For some reason, several of my recent posts did not get sent out by MailChimp, my e-mail service. So you probably missed out on 
Well, the post that was going to be written on Christmas Eve is being written today. What with cooking, and running around madly, and game playing, and movie watching, all with our guests in the house, my beloved sister-in-law and her husband (my brother-in-law-in-law), not a whole lot of blog posting has taken place. I have some time this morning, though, and want to get some more material down before the start of the new year.
How do ya like the new look? We don’t have everything in place yet, but I was determined to get the new banner, title and colors up and running. As I chip away at this in the next couple of weeks you’ll see new tabs appear on the menu bar at the top of the page. At some point I had decided to split off my hospitality posts into a separate website, “Intentional Hospitality,” and now I’m re-merging them into this material and re-naming the whole thing. Got that?
Oh my goodness! I don’t know that I’ve ever seen as much nonsense packed into two sentences as with these:
I could distill my boring principles for eating well into the following short statements: