In our culture, we have eliminated the idea of eating to live. We live to either eat correctly, by which I mean healthy nourishing foods, or just gorge — eating junk and drinking ourselves into a stupor so we can feel horrific the next day and avoid making the connection between how we feel and what we eat.

I’ve watched people eat unhealthy foods just to annoy those who eat right and hurt themselves in the process. Many people become extremists in dieting and limiting their intake just to reach a certain weight.

It is high time we eliminate the concept of dieting and introduce the concept of eating nourishing foods to help us stay healthy and balanced.

We have to learn to avoid gaining unnecessary weight, finding ourselves yo-yo dieting and taking drugs, or taking extreme measures to get back to what we consider our ideal weight.

Overexercising is just as unhealthy for your body and health as not exercising. Obsessively limiting the foods we eat is dangerous, and eating the same thing over and over, avoiding variety, causes serious medical problems in the long run.

Most women gain weight after 40 because their hormone balance changes and, as they enter perimenopausal years, the estradiol/progesterone/ testosterone/thyroid/adrenal ratios change, leaving them more susceptible to weight gain.

If the hormones are balanced properly with the correct bioidentical formulations, this problem is easily avoided.

Most diets fail because they are not realistic. You can go to Canyon Ranch or any other spa, live a totally unrealistic life, and lose weight. When you return home, you are faced with a different lifestyle, and the diets at these fat farms or spas do not prepare you for re-entry, so you gain the weight you lost immediately.

Fad diets also fail for similar reasons. The only way you can make things work permanently is to follow a well-balanced diet to help you lose the weight and then transition to a permanent lifestyle change that includes what you eat and when you eat, together with exercise, sleep, and stress management.