Everything that slows us down and forces patience everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
If you continually diet you are putting your body in a quasi-famine situation. It slows your metabolism down and breaks the thermostat. Diets don't work. They don't help you understand why you're eating more than your body wanted in the first place.
The honest truth is that if this government were to propose the massacre of the first-born it would still have no difficulty in getting it through the Commons.