Normally dieting shouldn't be necessary to maintain healthy weight though? One could eat a whole lot of salad (with some serious dressing) and a piece of meat and even a little starchy side (some potatoes or similar) 3 times a day and not gain weight. Throw in some regular moderate exercise and you're golden.

Granted, once you go past middle age, it can become a bit more complicated.

Someone brought up doughnuts as an example, but that's a ridiculous source of calories: I could probably down half a dozen doughnuts (a daily calorie budget) and then go for a normal meal afterwards.

Eating only becomes disordered if one can't be bothered to eat healthy food as a rule and then freaks out about weight gain as a result.

>Basically every adult woman exhibits some level of disordered eating because of it— "girl dinner" is both funny because it's true and sad

This is sexist and absolutely not true, there are plenty of women capable of pre-planning what they're going to eat and sticking with it. It's not "dieting", it's living a healthy lifestyle and not regularly eating junk.

We are human animals. Our bodies need healthy food and regular exercise. There’s a case that diet and exercise are worth willpower capacity, possibly more so than anything else. That’s just the reality we exist in?

It doesn't make you magically lose weight, it just gets you closer to "girl dinnering" with less cognitive load. The weight loss comes from eating less.

There is absolutely virtue in spending willpower to make your body do something it doesn’t want to do - maintaining and developing self control and autonomy. Imagine if there was no way to develop self-discipline, you’d be at the whims of your environment and the world would be nothing but chaos.