Monday, again

It's Sunday night. You've had a weekend that went the way weekends go, and now you're sitting on the sofa with your phone, and you've downloaded the app, or found the plan, or written the list. Tomorrow starts it. No bread, or no sugar, or nothing after seven, or points, or a shake at lunch. You feel something close to relief. The last few weeks have been a mess and this puts a shape on the next ones.

Monday is good. Tuesday is good. Wednesday you're hungry by four but you hold. Thursday there's a box of biscuits on the desk at work, opened, and at half past three you have one. It's a biscuit. Then, because you've had one, the day has gone, so you have three more, and at home there's the thing you'd said you wouldn't have, and you have it, because Thursday is finished anyway. Friday is a takeaway and the word "Monday". Saturday and Sunday are what they'd have been without the diet, plus a feeling. Monday you don't start. You've lost the will. A fortnight later, on a Sunday night, there's a new app.

This is an invented fortnight, but I'd guess it's close. Now count. How many of these have there been? Most readers who stop to count find it's in the dozens over a few years, and that they'd never added them up, because each one felt like a separate event with its own separate failure. They aren't separate. They're one thing that happens over and over, and it has a shape, and the shape is the subject of this book.

Some words. I'll call the new plan and its first day the fresh start. Whatever the plan forbids and requires, I'll call the rules. The first time a rule gets broken, the Thursday biscuit, is the first break. What you say to yourself after the first break, that the day's ruined or the week's gone, I'll call the write-off. The verdict you pass on yourself afterwards, greedy, weak, hopeless, is the blame. And the whole thing, fresh start, rules, first break, write-off, blame, fresh start, I'll call the cycle. The alternative to the cycle, which is the second half of the book, I'll call the ordinary week, and the meal after a slip, in the ordinary week, is an ordinary meal.

Before you go on, do one thing. On the back of an envelope, list every diet you can remember starting in the last three years. Next to each, roughly how long it lasted, and how it ended. Not why. How. The biscuit, the birthday, the holiday, the bad week. Keep the list. It's the most useful document in this book, and it's already written. You just haven't looked at it in one place.