I could distill my Boring Principles for eating well into the following short statements:

1. Eat a decent breakfast.

2. Do not eat anything else until lunch.

3. Eat a decent lunch.

4. Do not eat anything else until dinner.

5. Eat a decent dinner.

6. Do not eat anything else until breakfast.

7. Don’t drink sugared beverages and drink lots of water.

That’s it, really. If you followed those rules you’d cut out snacking, always a good thing. You’d be healthier. You’d feel better because your digestive system was being able to deal with one batch of food before another one came down the hatch. You’d almost certainly lose weight, should that be an item on your agenda.

The only exceptions to the above Magic Seven would be:

1. If you can’t eat dinner until after 6:00 and you’re really hungry by 4:00, eat something small at that time. If it’s planned i advance, it counts as a mini-meal, not a sn-a-a-a-a-a-a-ck.

2. If you go to a party or special meal out and eat more than you normally would, cut down on the amount you eat for the next day or so.

3. If you feel that you must skip a meal, skip dinner.

So simple! You’d simply walk past/ignore/refuse any and all other food offered to you/shoved at you/on display for you to take. (As I write this post I’ve just gotten back from Costco, which is a great place, but man! the amount of junk on display would fill a . . . discount warehouse.)

You know what? As a rule, we fallen human beings don’t want to follow these rules, because:

They’re boring. (The food isn’t boring, or shouldn’t be; I’m talking about the routine.) They require that we do the same things over and over again. We want drama! Human beings are constantly being snookered by appeals to our love of novelty. So we follow ridiculously-restricted diets. We buy ridiculously-expensive protein shakes. We take supplements that make ridiculous claims. All of this is completely unnecessary and counterproductive. (The exception being, of course, the need for people with genuine allergies or intolerances to avoid what makes them sick—but that’s not my point here.)

I’m always reminded when I talk about the human need for drama of my experiences from 1995 to 2000 when I started playing the Piano for some of the services at our little church in Virginia. I’ve told this story many times, but it’s always fresh and new! I needed to resuscitate my extremely rusty piano skills in order to play four hymns straight out of the hymnbook and something for an offertory, a part of the service that lasted about 30 seconds. So what did I need to do?

I needed to sit myself at the piano and practice those four hymns until I knew them well enough to play them with confidence.

That was it. I needed to do what needed to be done so that I could do what needed to be done. My work at the piano needed to connect in a straight line to my actual playing for the service.

But what did I do? Longtime readers know the story: I bought fancy hymnplaying books. I bought books of fancy sacred arrangements to use for offertories. I took lessons from a well-known and brilliant piano teacher who was supremely uninterested in teaching me how to play hymns but instead had me work on classical pieces. I performed in two of his recitals, spending hours upon hours mastering and memorizing my selections.

What did all of this have to do with the matter at hand? Not much. If I’d spent as much time on my hymns as I spent on my recital pieces, I’d never have stumbled and bumbled my way through a service. As time went on I could have started adding some flourishes to the simple chords out of the hymnbook, and by the time those five years were over I might have been pretty good at hymnplaying for congregational singing, which was my original goal. When we joined another, much larger, church, I might have been able to fill in for services there. But I was never really good enough to do that, because I had done all this other stuff that distracted me from what I was actually trying to do. Eventually I just quit playing the piano completely.

The same kind of thing happens when people don’t want to do the stuff that actually works when it comes to healthful, normal eating: “Don’t tell me all this common-sense stuff! I want to do something dramatic! I want to spend lots of money! I want to listen to some guru tell me what to do!” The problem is that, and here I quote myself:

If you don’t do what works, it won’t work.

Here’s a great song from the great Dionne Warwick, telling you what you need to do as you navigate the treacherous waters of the upcoming holiday season with its many, many treats: just walk on by:

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