To acquire complete control over your life. Who wouldn’t want to do that?

But even if you devote all of yours to doing just that — even if you renounce all your worldly possessions, move to a monastery, and meditate all day — it’s highly unlikely to happen. Like one-in-a-million unlikely.

In large part, that’s because of a plain-as-day point Michael A. Singer makes in “Mastering Life: The Art of Handling Everything,” a podcast intended to improve those aforementioned odds. It’s that the world’s a “happening place.”

So whether you’re sitting in a New Delhi ashram or a New York City traffic jam, what you need to do, according to the author of The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment, is learn to “handle it.” In other words, not to be bothered by the “it” of the moment, your baby crying, your good friend lying, an appliance or a loved one dying.

You’ve read about this belief of Singer’s in this column before as a way to help you handle the proliferation of ultraprocessed foods. His belief bears mention again, oddly enough, for when it specifically comes to your body weight, it appears you need to do more than “handle it” as Singer asserts.

That’s because handling “it” means managing or dealing with a situation, and we’re in the midst of an obesity epidemic that we are not handling well. If you need proof, just go to a crowded store and check out the size and shape of the shoppers and the workers there.

A stronger word than “handle,” therefore, is more apropos.

Since dominating a situation means to be in command of it, to be the controller and not the one being controlled, “dominate” fits the bill. It’s what you need to do to take charge of your diet.

Just don’t go overboard while doing so.

Because while maintaining a healthy body weight may be the best way to engender physical health, it becomes a pyrrhic victory if it winds up depressing you. Therefore, you need to be aware of a recent study published June 2 in the journal BMJ Nutrition, Preventions and Health reviewing information gathered on 28,525 adults via National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) 2007-2018 that has added important new information about the link between eating and depression.

Healthy eating, such as adhering to the Mediterranean diet, has been linked in the past to reducing depressive symptoms, while unhealthy eating has been associated with increasing them. This study, however, found diets unlike the Mediterranean, ones that restrict calories or single nutrients (like carbohydrate, fat, sugar, or salt), lead to having more depressive symptoms than if you follow other diets — or follow no eating plan at all.

Moreover, depressive symptoms increase even more if the dieter is already overweight and follows a nutrient-restricted diet rather than a calorie-restricted one.

Although it’s imperative to remember that depression can result from many factors besides diet, a link between the two is far from a stretch — especially if you leave the science world behind and focus on yours. For I’m sure if you take the time to recall some recent times when you were a bit down in the mouth and what you put into it before and during that time it wasn’t exactly exemplary stuff.

In a manner of speaking, bad food made you blue.

And according to another study, a red one, processed meat, qualifies as a bad food, and not much of it is needed to adversely affect you — no more than one hot dog a day.

In the study published in the June 2025 issue of Nature Medicine, researchers reviewed data from over 60 previous studies. In doing so, they determined eating small amounts of processed meat may raise the risk of serious diseases, including cancer, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.

In fact, a single hot dog a day puts you at a 7 percent greater risk of colorectal cancer and an 11 percent greater risk of type 2 diabetes compared to those who do not eat processed meat.

Furthermore, sugar-sweetened drinks qualifies as a bad-food group according to this study. For the researchers found that consuming one 12-ounce soda every day puts you at an 8 percent increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes when compared to those who don’t.

Developing type 2 diabetes and dealing with depression are certainly detriments to your health, so now you should realize why I played Mr. Word Person at the start and made such a big deal about the difference between handling a situation as opposed to dominating one. For if you do not dominate your diet in the truest sense of the word, you cede control and make it possible for your diet to dominate you.