"I'm just greedy"

After the write-off comes the blame, and the blame has a vocabulary. Greedy. Weak. No willpower. Hopeless. You've said these to yourself on more Fridays than you could count, and the fact that you've said them so often feels like evidence that they're true.

I'd like to put the blame next to the mechanism. Chapters 3 to 9 describe what happens to a person on a diet. Restraint makes a break lead to more eating. Planning the diet makes them eat on Sunday. Weight loss raises hunger and keeps it raised for a year. Restriction raises cortisol and counting raises stress. Then a biscuit arrives. A person in that state who eats the biscuit and then four more is not displaying greed. They're displaying the effects of a diet, in the order the research predicts, and greed is the name the diet gives to its own consequences so that you'll start another one.

That last part is the important one. The blame isn't just unpleasant. It's functional. It's what makes the fresh start feel necessary. If Thursday was your fault, then the answer is to try harder, and trying harder means a new plan, and the new plan is Sunday night's relief. A person who understood that Thursday was the diet's fault wouldn't need a new diet. They'd need to stop having diets. So the blame is the part of the cycle that closes the loop, and dropping it isn't self-indulgence. It's the thing that stops the loop closing.

The vocabulary usually has a history. Greedy is a word that was said to you, or about you, or about someone at a table you sat at as a child, and it arrived with a look. It's worth knowing that, because a word with a history in it does more damage than a word without one, and because the diet didn't invent the blame. It found it already there and gave it a Friday to be said on. The blame will be quieter when the Fridays stop, and it'll be quieter still when you notice whose voice it was in.

There's a whole book in this series about talking to yourself the way you'd talk to a friend, and it's named in the notes. Here I'd only ask you to run the friend test once. A friend tells you they were on a diet, had a biscuit on Thursday, and ate the rest of the box. Would you call them greedy? You'd say something about the diet. Say it to yourself.