But eventually I realized this has to become my mother-effing lifestyle if I want to keep looking that way. It's not that I can't do it. It's that the tradeoffs just aren't worth it for me. So I gave it up, piled on pounds for a few years until I felt the need for another health intervention. what I do now is to eat more deliberately and pay close attention to the feeling of satiety so I can stop eating. Pounds are slowly melting away.
My father has the same mindset as Penn. He can't simply watch his eating. Willpower gets depleted and he finds himself eating the rest of the cookies in the bag, and the other two bags as well.
For him, he has to cut out everything "bad". He has to frame it in terms of a moral conflict because otherwise cheat meals turn into cheat days and cheat days turn into dropping the diet for months until he works up the willpower to do it again.
He's also an alcoholic, has been dry for 25 years. Still goes to daily meetings.
When I lost willpower, I gained 20-30 pounds over 5 years. When my father loses willpower, he gains 50-100 pounds. He might do this twice a year.
All-or-nothing feels like prison for me. It's freeing for the addictive mind. Once the moral dynamic is surrendered to, agency is found. The non-addictive mind seeks harmony between competing desires and urges, the desire to have a fun and varied diet vs the desire to be fit and healthy. Addicts can't have harmony because they lose willpower faster than they can accomplish goals. Only in disharmony can they find lasting agency.