B is for Betterness

Diets are built on perfection. They hand you a set of rules, and the moment you break one, the whole structure collapses — which is why one cookie so often becomes an entire weekend, and one missed workout becomes a lost month.

Betterness replaces the pass/fail test with a direction. The only question it asks is: is this better than what I would have done before? Not best. Not ideal. Better.

This sounds soft. It is actually far more demanding, because it never lets you off the hook with an all-or-nothing excuse. You cannot fail at betterness — you can only stop choosing it. And you can choose it again at the very next decision, which is never more than a few hours away.