 Establishing a healthy diet that can be maintained over time has to focus on sensible substitutions rather than simple elimination of the foods we like to eat. This is one of the reasons why skipping meals doesn't usually help to maintain a healthy weight because our bodies will find ways to make up for a perceived deprivation of food. Here's a simple exercise to help you start thinking about healthy substitutions. Go through a typical day's food intake and identify times when you're habitually eating less than desirable foods. For example, the 48-year-old man in our case study usually wound up snacking on potato chips and candy in the evenings. What if that unhealthy snack food were to be replaced with a healthy satisfying dip and some fresh crisp veggies? Veggies and hummus are a great snack food substitution that can be found minimally processed in most grocery stores or it can even be whipped up in minutes from some simple ingredients that you can keep on hand in the kitchen. Even making your own salad dressing instead of buying bottled salad dressing at the store this is a simple healthful substitution that can even save some money. A simple vinaigrette can be thrown together in minutes and kept in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a week. Another sensible substitution if you're craving something crisp and slightly salty is homemade popcorn which can be made in a pot or a popcorn maker. An added benefit, you get to control the salt and if you're using any oil at all you can control the amount and type of oil that you use. In general the homemade versions of almost anything you crave will be healthier and probably tastier than the processed version of those foods. Do you crave chicken nuggets? Make them from scratch using organic chicken if you can. The homemade version only requires six ingredients chicken, flour, egg, bread crumbs, olive oil and salt to taste. Compare that with the ingredients in fast food chicken nuggets. If you feel like an occasional piece of cake, make it from scratch using eggs, a reasonable amount of sugar, butter, almond flour and baking powder. A slice of cake like this is almost guaranteed to be more satisfying and your dessert intake will be tempered because you're making it yourself. You're not going to make dessert every night if you're cooking yourself because it's too much damn work and so there's something about the act of cooking that enforces without us even being conscious of it a healthy, wholesome diet. I think it's very hard to get fat on home-cooked food. For every unhealthy food there's a healthy home-cooked counterpart and learning how to prepare these substitutions is one of the keys to long-term weight management and an ongoing celebration of food.