Food does not have a moral value. Just as a chair is neither good nor bad, chocolate is neither good or bad, it's just chocolate.  Eating 50g of chocolate in one hit is not going to harm your health, eating 50 pounds of chocolate most likely will.  The same can be said for eating broccoli or drinking water.

Eating a food you label as bad, tends to make you feel bad or guilty when eating it.  Such thinking is nonsense; just as wearing jeans doesn't make you a bad person, eating a certain food does not make you a bad person.  The food is not the problem, it's the "thinking" that needs to change.

Note: This post was bumped from 12/15/15 for new viewers.

...........So,
I read about how your body is always sending you Secret Messages, and when I listened for one,

THIS is what it said.    

From a weight management perspective, the CURRENCY of weight is calories. 

Although exchange rates vary between individuals, as well as between different kinds of food, what remains consistent is that each of us will always need our own personal calorie deficit to lose, and own own personal calorie surplus to gain.

Although calorie counting will always be approximate, at this present time, the term “Calorie” is the only useful way we have to mentally define and describe energy use.  This is true, even though:

• People are not walking math formulas whereby if they have 3,500 more or less calories than they burn they'll gain or lose a pound.
  
  
• 3,500 calories of one food or type of food will likely have a different impact on health, hunger, thermic effect, and weight than 3,500 calories of another food or type of food.
  
  
• Different people have different caloric efficiencies whereby they are seemingly able to extract more calories from food or reserves than others and lose weight with more difficulty (and gain with greater ease).
  

Calories in physics are simple, but not in physiology.

Below is a rather thorough article which demonstrates the many difficulties that are involved when considering calorie counting as an “accurate” weight-loss or weight-maintenance tool.

Why the calorie is broken
                    by Nicola Twilley, and Cynthia Graber

“For me, a calorie is a unit of measurement that’s a real pain in the rear.”

Bo Nash is 38. He lives in Arlington, Texas, where he’s a technology director for a textbook publisher. And he’s 5’10” and 245 lbs – which means he is classed as obese.

In an effort to lose weight, Nash uses an app to record the calories he consumes and a Fitbit band to track the energy he expends. These tools bring an apparent precision: Nash can quantify the calories in each cracker crunched and stair climbed. But when it comes to weight gain, he finds that not all calories are equal. How much weight he gains or loses seems to depend less on the total number of calories, and more on where the calories come from and how he consumes them. The unit, he says, has a “nebulous quality to it”.

Tara Haelle is also obese. She had her second son on St Patrick’s Day in 2014, and hasn’t been able to lose the 70 lbs she gained during pregnancy. Haelle is a freelance science journalist, based in Illinois. She understands the science of weight loss, but, like Nash, doesn’t see it translate into practice. “It makes sense from a mathematical and scientific and even visceral level that what you put in and what you take out, measured ...