In an essay he penned in 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” People cite that statement to this day because foolish consistency plays a role in many modern-day problems.

Including weight loss.

But according to one recent study on the subject, it may be time for a companion quotation. Like “a sensible consistency is the elf of little bellies.”

This is an elf you want on your shelf not just at Christmastime.

Far more often than not, a little belly means you have your body weight in the right place. That increases your odds of a greater lifespan, a greater healthspan, and better day-to-day health.

But even if you’re not one of the more than 70 percent of adult Americans who have overweight or obesity, you need to know about this study. For a dietary approach that allows the overweight and obese to lose weight will allow those who aren’t to maintain a healthy one.

Published earlier this year in the American Psychological Association’s journal Health Psychology, the work examines “whether repetitive eating patterns are more effective for weight control than flexible eating behavior.” It uses previously collected data supplied by 112 overweight or obese adults who participated in a 12-week behavioral weight loss study.

In that first study, the mostly female participants who averaged 53 years of age tracked the calories they consumed by logging their meals and snacks into a Fitbit app. In the second, a group of researchers led by Charlotte J. Hagerman, PHD, social/health psychologist and investigator at Oregon Research Institute, further analyzed those 105,422 food entries.

They separated the entries into two groups: unique foods, those eaten by an individual only once during the study, and repeats, those foods eaten more than once.

It’s important to note that to be deemed a repeat, the wording of the entry needed to be an exact match, which’s why the more than 15,000 entries for condiments and beverages were eliminated. The researchers didn’t want a change from ranch to Italian or Americano to cappuccino to produce inaccurate results.

Producing accurate results is also why the study lasted the amount of time it did. For “food records after 12 weeks are unlikely to provide an accurate representation of participants’ eating patterns because food tracking adherence tends to decline after this,” yet 12 weeks is long enough for “meaningful” weight loss to occur.

Which occurred on average in the initial study.

In the second, the researchers crunched the numbers to determine what effect calorie stability and dietary repetition played in the weight loss.

A rather significant one, they discovered.

Significant enough for Hagerman, the lead author, to write “the results give reason to believe that reducing [food] variety overall, even with low-calorie nutritious foods, may help form consistent routines that support weight loss.” This comes after she discloses the participants whose majority of food entries were repeats experienced an average weight loss of 5.9 percent, whereas those participants whose majority of food entries were unique had an average weight loss of 4.3 percent.

For a 250-pound person, that’s a difference of 4 pounds.

The reinvestigation also found “lower average calorie deviation predicted higher 12-week weight loss. Specifically, for every 100-calorie increase in deviation, weight loss was expected to decrease by 0.6 percent.”

Which is unsettling news for dieters who incorporate a cheat day into theirs once a week. While it doesn’t doom their efforts necessarily, it seems to lessen weight loss, thereby increasing the time needed to reach a weight-loss goal.

As mentioned before, this is a need-to-know study even if you’re not overweight or obese at the moment. Because variety, even in healthy diets, leads to decision making, and bad decision making is a real possibility when it comes to food choice.

That’s because of the phenomenon known a hedonic drive, aka hedonic hunger, something AI defines as “the psychological motivation to seek pleasure and gratification, specifically eating for enjoyment rather than to satisfy physical energy needs.” This study cites prior research that shows “consuming a wide variety of foods increases hedonic drive toward food, making self-regulation more difficult.”

But guess what makes self-regulation less difficult? Habit.

It’s why you don’t spend time in bathroom mirror every morning wondering if you should brush your teeth or not. It’s why, except for snacks, I don’t spend time any time wondering what I should eat.

Breakfast, lunch, and supper have already been decided based on the day of the week. Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday suppers, for instance, feature an omelet, Brussels sprouts, and mushrooms; those on Wednesday and Friday a mix of fat-free mozzarella cheese, shirataki noodles, and garlic bread; those on the weekend potatoes and protein pudding — and all are accompanied by a monster salad devoid of dressing.

Since I began following a pattern like this about 30 years ago, the only weight problem I’ve ever experienced is losing too much of it.