Do you think Adam and Eve, before the fall, had such a hard time keeping their weight down and staying fit? I mean, they didn’t have to do any work in the garden and could eat whenever they wanted, and yet, in every picture you see, they look pretty fit.

But then they just had to go and eat that stupid apple.

Our bodies were made to be hunters and gatherers, and it used to be that to get a hamburger, you’d have to walk, jog and sprint over seven miles to kill the animal with spears, cut it up and then haul it back to your clan. Think of it, seven miles of interval training to have a burger. And when you want more, you gotta go back out again. (I’m not sure how paleolithic man got cheese and pickles.) Now, it’s as easy as driving through the drive-through and pressing the button to roll my window down without even having to get out of my car.

I used to think that a serving in a restaurant was based on some recommendation of some government experts on portion sizes, that you couldn’t go wrong by finishing what was in your plate. What a dummy I was! The truth is that restaurants sell what the public wants. Walk down any street, and by the looks of us, we want to eat too much. So restaurants draw us in with their bigger plates. There’s plenty of salt to make it tasty (and us thirsty), but too much for our blood pressure. And fat, too. Eating animal fat makes you feel satisfied and good. So we gobble down our cheesy pepperoni pizzas, our foie gras, our well-marbled steak and our buttered-up potatoes. And it feels oh-so-good when we walk out of that restaurant all salted and buttered up, especially after a nice dollop of crème brulee, or double chocolate cake with iced cream oozing in melted puddles of chocolaty sin.

Not long ago, a patient came into see me for his yearly visit. He’d been doing all the right things, exercising and walking every day, wearing a Fitbit. But for some reason, he grew a lot wider in the last year. He admitted, “I got cocky and figured I could do it and cheat a bit, but it gradually got the best of me.”

Which I completely understand. I mostly try to eat right, exercise, lose weight and then feel like I deserve a little treat, a little cheating on my diet. Maybe my wife, Carla, will cook bacon and eggs on the weekend and make her glorious waffles, slathered in butter and syrup. Or maybe she’ll make cinnamon buns or apple pie, and I feel like it’s OK, I can cheat because I’ve been so good for so long, and then BAM, I’ve gained 5 pounds.

We all have our crosses to bear, and I guess mine is that I married a smoking hot wife who is an amazing cook and who seems to actually like it when I cheat. On my DIET, of course. (I’m pretty sure that any other type of cheating would incite red-hot terror of an Italian woman’s rage and probably result in a lot of blood and pain.)

Ever since they ate the apple in the Garden, it’s so “damned” hard to stay healthy.