There's a version of health that treats every meal as a negotiation. You allow yourself this but not that. You calculate, substitute, and moderate until eating out with friends becomes an exercise in controlled deprivation. The result is that you spend a significant portion of your life slightly unsatisfied at the table and, if you're being honest, thinking about food constantly anyway.
The tradeoff isn't as good as it looks.
I'm not arguing against caring about what you eat. Nutrition matters. None of that is in dispute. What I'm pushing back on is the psychology of constant dietary vigilance, the kind where good food becomes the enemy and enjoying a meal without guilt becomes something you have to earn.
Some of the best moments of my life have happened around food. A meal in Athens that lasted four hours. Street food in Hong Kong at midnight. A dinner in Jamaica where I couldn't tell you what we ordered but I can still describe the feeling of it. None of those moments would have been better with a side of calorie counting.
Food is one of the few pleasures that is genuinely universal. It connects people. It marks occasions. It is, across every culture I've visited, one of the primary ways humans take care of each other. Treating it primarily as a vector for weight management is a strange narrowing of what it actually is.
The people I know with the healthiest relationships with food are not the ones who dieted the most. They're the ones who stopped making food a moral category. They eat well most of the time because they enjoy eating well, and they eat what they want when they want it because that's also part of eating well.
The body you're restricting yourself into is going to age either way. The memories are permanent. Order the thing.