Diets are exhausting, consume precious mental energy, and are not at all fun. So why do so many of us sign up for whatever diet is currently being hawked? Supersmartie Victoria Moran breaks it down and gives us answers.

Why do you think so many women are on diets all the time?  Is it the culture? Is it a reaction to all the processed and fast foods we're constantly surrounded by? Do you think sometimes we work on our bodies instead of working on our character?

All of the above. When you're on a diet, you don't have to look at your life. Once, before I got a handle on the food thing, I was very involved in theater. I remember calling my drama teacher and saying I needed to drop out for 6 weeks because I was going to be on a diet. She was beside her self laughing, but to me it made complete sense. Any time you can focus on doing something with food, you get this feeling of power: "At least I'm in control of something." But control is an illusion. You can feel that you're in control and then you can walk down the street and an ice block can fall on your head. 

The reason women are dieting all the time is because our culture tells us that if we look a certain way, then we are acceptable, then we deserve to breathe air and take up space. What has happened over the past 30 years is that it is now the norm to carry extra fat. But now that majority is more maligned than when they were a minority. The food that is the easiest to get and cheapest, and the food we've been trained to be addicted to, is the kind that makes people fat. The diet mentality is a temporary cessation of that. "I'm going to go on a diet and lose weight and then get back to normal."

Can you say more about fast food and why it's so unhealthy and addictive?

Fast food was never normal for our physiology; it might be ubiquitous, but it's not normal. Fast foods are very concentrated—highly concentrated and highly addictive. What causes that satiety pattern in the brain to kick in is when there's bulk in your stomach. Fast foods have a lot of fat, a lot of calories, but not a lot of bulk in the sense that there is very little water content and very little nutrition in them. You're starving from lack of nutrients.

These foods are almost drug-like in their composition; salt and sugar mixed with fat produces a drug-like quality. In fast food, you're essentially taking two very addictive condiments (sugar and salt) and putting them in the medium of fat that guarantees the addiction. In short: drive past, not through.