Hello again. This is Monica Reinagel and you're listening to the nutrition divas quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

To celebrate the release of my two latest e-books, we're doing something

a little special this week. Instead of my usual weekly episode, I'm doing three. My thanks to

our friends at iTunes for highlighting this special series on the most common mistakes that even nutrition savvy people make with their diets.

And a warm welcome to any new listeners who have just discovered our show.

So in the first installment of this three-part series, I talked about the all-important difference

between natural and healthy.

We often make the mistake of thinking that something is good for you just because it's all natural or organic.

In the second part, I talked about quality versus quantity.

Even when a food is good for you, it doesn't necessarily follow that you can eat as much of it as you want.

And today in the final installment, I want to talk about focusing on the average or mean rather than the extremes in your diet.

Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about.

A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving,

a writer called me to interview me for a piece she was working on.

The average Thanksgiving dinner is said to contain 3,000 calories and her story

was on ways to burn 3,000 calories over the course of the Thanksgiving Day weekend, ostensibly neutralizing the effect of the big meal.

It was a cute idea, and I've included a link to the piece in the show notes if you'd like to take a look at it.

But this is a perfect example of how we tend to

overestimate the impact of our most extreme behavior and underestimate the importance of our typical

behavior. Obviously a single day of overindulging is not going to make you

fat any more than a single hyperactive weekend is going to keep you slim. How much you eat and exercise and all the rest of the days of the year

is what's really going to determine your size and shape. We seem to be wired to pay more attention

...