“Most slim people don’t employ restrictive diets or intense health regimes to stay at a healthy weight,” he said in a statement. “Instead, they practice easy habits like not skipping breakfast, and listening to inner cues.”

Of course, only eating when you’re hungry and passing up pizza for homemade soup is its own kind of diet. (Indeed, according to the release, 92 percent of the registrants reported being “conscious of what they ate.” )

The reason many people diet is for the structure: Maybe they don’t have time to cook vegetables for dinner, or don’t know how, or they just like having a piece of cake after an already too-big meal. Those people are looking for some strict food rules to follow temporarily, and they find them in the form of a diet. But the way the registry participants maintain their svelte weights (136 pounds, on average) is by following some slightly less strict food rules for pretty much their entire lives. It explains why they’re thin, yes, but it’s not exactly the easy way out.