Why the fresh start feels right

Before I take the fresh start apart, I want to say what it does for you, because it isn't nothing and you're not a fool for reaching for it.

It works at first. The first week of nearly any diet goes well. The scale drops, often by several pounds, and it doesn't matter for the feeling that most of that is water. You feel lighter and you feel in charge.

It brings clarity. A week with rules in it is a week where you know what to do at every meal. No deciding, no negotiating with yourself. Just the plan.

It brings hope. Sunday night is the best night of the cycle. Everything is ahead of you and none of it has gone wrong yet.

It brings control. The weeks before the fresh start felt like drift, and the fresh start is the opposite of drift. It says that you decide what goes in, and that's a good feeling after a fortnight of feeling that you didn't.

Last time was the wrong plan. That's the thought that makes this time different. The shakes were unrealistic. The points were fiddly. The fasting made you dizzy. This one is sensible, and that's why it'll hold.

Everyone does it. January is a month of fresh starts. The office has a diet going. Your sister's on one. It would be odd not to.

And underneath it all, you'd like something about your body or your eating to be different, and a plan is the only tool you've been offered. Nobody handed you another one. The magazines, the apps, the January adverts and the office all offer the same thing, which is a fresh start with rules in it, and when the only tool on the table is a diet, picking it up isn't a failure of imagination. It's what's there.

There are needs under all of this. A need to feel in charge of what you eat. A need for structure. A need for hope after a bad patch. A need to be doing something about a thing that bothers you. Those needs are real and the ordinary week, later in the book, is built to meet them. What I'll show is that the fresh start meets them for a fortnight and then hands you the write-off and the blame, and that the blame is what makes the next fresh start feel necessary, and that this is the whole engine of the cycle.