I did something fairly unusual for me last week: I went out to lunch. I had a coupon for a buy one get one free item at a casual sit-down chain restaurant that sells (essentially) sandwiches, salads, and soup. So I asked my co-worker and we had a nice lunch. Both of us ordered entree salads.

We were sitting and eating when he made a comment that really stuck with me:

I feel so virtuous when I get a salad. It makes me want to go home and do something not-so-virtuous this evening.

I'm kicking myself for not asking: like what? I'm assuming he doesn't mean decapitating a small animal, as he doesn't strike me as the type. To many people, especially dieters, this kind of thinking can lead to eating a package of cookies in the evening because you were "good" at lunch.

Except neither my coworker or I were "virtuous" or "good" at lunch. We just ate a salad.

At the heart of these kinds of statements, aside from the good/bad food issue, is self-control. And self-control typically doesn't come natural to humans. You exerted "control" at lunch, so you can let loose later. If you feel you overate last night, you can show your "self-control" today and eat lettuce. Or so say the diet/nutrition columnists, anyway. In an obvious irony, I have problems with self-control of my self-control, letting my controlling behaviors run amok.

Some have proposed teaching kids better self-control as a way to prevent obesity. Researchers found that those kids who could wait for a longer period of time before obtaining a food reward had higher BMIs. Maybe it's a problem with self-control, or maybe these kids were just hungry. We don't know.

I find it ironic that the solution to supposed "lack of control" around food (as if that could be the only reason that anyone had a BMI above 25!) involves more self-control, when we know that humans, as a rule, suck at this. When we also know that imposing self-control leads to out-of-control behaviors later. Why not remove the "control" aspect entirely? No one over-consumes oxygen. Outside of obvious medical pathology, people really don't berate themselves for producing too much urine. It might be a trifle inconvenient, but no one measures their self-worth or self-control by how much they do or don't pee.

It is the human intervention and need to control that people start dieting, which typically ends in net weight gain, not weight loss. People can and do self-regulate around food. No really. They do. Our environment doesn't like to give them that chance. There's too much money to be made on diet products, obesity prevention and the health scare du jour.

But the healthiest eaters I know are the ones that don't show deliberate self-control around food. A salad lunch doesn't lead to a doughnut binge later on. They eat when they're hungry and stop when they're full. The rest takes care of itself.