is it healthy or sustainable?

The premium placed on weight means we often fail to consider improvements that can be made to health independent of it, such as physical fitness. “Health-promoting behaviours can all have a beneficial effect, even if switching your lifestyle to incorporate them doesn’t result in weight loss,” says West. “Sadly, the focus on weight loss as the only valuable goal … can lead to people pursuing weight loss at any cost, and feeling that healthy behaviours are only worthwhile if they result in an aesthetic change.”

One possible solution to diet dogma is an approach called intuitive eating: learning to eat mainly in response to physiological hunger and satiety cues. Although a relatively new area of investigation, there are promising findings: a 2017 paper found an increased awareness of internal cues to eat had “the potential to address problematic eating behaviours and the challenges many face with controlling their food intake”.

Intuitive eaters seem to have less anxiety and fewer internalised rules about food. Learning to be guided by your body also allows for flexibility and long-term sustainability, without the high likelihood of “failure” imposed by extreme external rules. For some, intuitive eating may be one answer to the question of how to break a nonstop cycle of dieting. Improving fitness is another. But the answer to long-term, sustainable good health is probably not wrapping bacon round everything.

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Just Eat It: How Intuitive Eating Can Help You Get Your Shit Together Around Food by Laura Thomas (Bluebird) is out on 10 January