Balancing your diet properly is far more important than how much you eat, and it doesn't even have to be that difficult. Our bodies are complex machines that require many different nutrients to be able to achieve its full potential.
What leads to imbalances, poor health, and weight gain in the first place is when we ignore the natural needs of our bodies. Putting together a good diet is a bit more complicated than just cutting as much fat as you can, because there are many different types of fat. Some of them are beneficial, and our body requires certain amounts of them to be healthy.
As simplistic as it might seem, the food pyramid we're all familiar with from elementary school has a lot of merit to it, and many people that follow it are able to maintain health for their entire lives. Of course, as modern medical science has progressed, the structure of the pyramid has changed and improved over the years, and most people would agree that it's for the better.
The main thing is that you don't see the parameters of a diet based on such broad terms as hard, fast rules. Try to see them more as guidelines. There's a lot of room for personalizing your diet to meet your own tastes. There's even a category included in the new, extended food pyramid for "discretionary calories."
In other words, as long as you're getting the prescribed amounts of all of the major food groups, you can go a little bit nuts with what's leftover. Proper dieting doesn't have to feel like a college calculus class, and this is only one of many popular examples of very simple dieting guidelines that just plain work. It's amazing what problems we can avoid when we stop doing things to the point of excess.
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