"The weight is the problem"

Some readers will feel that this book has been avoiding the point. The reason for the diets is the weight. Whatever the cycle costs, the weight costs more, and a book about eating that won't talk about weight is dodging.

I'll say plainly where I stand. This book takes no position on whether you should weigh less. That's between you and your body and, if you want one, your GP, and I don't know your health. What the book argues is narrower. The cycle doesn't get you there. On the evidence in chapters 5 to 10, a dozen diets leave most people no lighter and many heavier, and each one costs a fortnight of hunger and a Friday of blame. Whatever you want your weight to be, the cycle is not the route.

If you do want to lose weight, the NHS route is short and it's the opposite of a fresh start. Aim to lose half a kilogram to a kilogram a week, not more. Don't lose weight suddenly with diets. Don't skip meals. Get active for a hundred and fifty minutes a week, in short sessions if you like. Swap sugary drinks for water. Share what you're doing with someone you trust, so there's a person to talk to on a bad day rather than a write-off. And if you'd like help, you can refer yourself to NHS weight management services in England without seeing a GP, or ask at your surgery. The NHS's own page says that if you've struggled with weight loss before, you're not alone, and offers an app and a plan. Those are all slow, structural, and unsudden, which is to say they're the ordinary week with a direction.

And if your weight is high enough to be a medical question, or it goes with diabetes, joint problems, breathlessness or anything else you've been told about, then the GP is the right first conversation, not a plan off the internet, and nothing in this book replaces that conversation.

What I'd ask you to notice is that the weight and the cycle are different problems, and that you've been treating the second as the solution to the first. It isn't. It's a third problem that the first one produced. Solve the cycle and the weight question becomes an ordinary one, to be answered slowly, with help if you want it, and without a Sunday night.