>Either way, I'm an idiot if I think I can eat those donuts now and just "pay them back" in a few months. That's not how food works. That's not how health works. It's not "good" that I'm packing on the pounds now.

In fact, that's exactly how food works. If you don't weight thousands of kilos right now it's because how much you've eaten and how much you've burned are more or less balanced, even if you're not at your ideal weight.

>It's going to be harder to work them off later.

Why? Literally, why? A Joule is a Joule whether it's now or later. It will literally cost you the same effort to burn a Joule's worth of fat now as it will ten years from now, because that's what effort is.

The way technical debt and "dieting debt" are different from financial debt is not in how (or whether) they're accrued and paid off, but in that financial debt has a time component, because the debt is with a second party. You can't hold a significant debt indefinitely, someone eventually comes to find you. Technical debt and dieting debt are debts you have with yourself -- or rather with your future self. There's no one to come looking for you, and you're only screwing yourself if you let the debt sit there unpaid and causing problems for yourself. That's why it's stupid to accrue it, not because of some effort calculus about how much more effort it's going to take to repay later.