The next meal is ordinary

This is the chapter that breaks the cycle, because it takes away the write-off, and without the write-off there's nothing to blame and no fresh start to need.

The slip will happen. A biscuit at half past three, or four, or the whole packet. A meal out that went long. A bad day with a takeaway in it. These aren't failures of the ordinary week. They're what weeks contain, for everyone, dieters and not. The ordinary week doesn't have a rule against them, so nothing has been broken.

No write-off. This is the one thing to hold onto. After the biscuit, the day is not gone. The day is a series of meals and one of them is coming at seven. "Well, that's today ruined" is a sentence, and you don't have to say it, and if you catch yourself saying it, the answer is "it's a biscuit".

No fresh start. Don't plan tomorrow. Tomorrow is an ordinary day with three meals in it, exactly like today was going to be, and it needs no planning. The urge to plan a fresh start is the cycle asking to run, and the answer is that there's nothing to start because nothing stopped.

No compensating. Don't skip dinner because of the biscuits, and don't make it small. A skipped or shrunken meal is a restriction, and restriction is the thing that turns a biscuit into a box. Have the dinner you'd have had. That's what ordinary means.

The sentence to say. If it helps to have words, these are the ones. "That was a biscuit. Dinner's at seven." Two sentences, and the second is the whole method.

The big slip. Sometimes it's not a biscuit. It's an evening, or a weekend, with a lot in it. The response is the same and it matters more. The next meal is ordinary. Not smaller, not skipped, not a Monday. Breakfast at the usual time, the usual size. The body has done this before, and what it learned last time was that a big weekend leads to a restriction, so it ate ahead. This time it learns that a big weekend leads to breakfast, and that's the lesson that ends the free-for-all.

Why this works. Herman and Mack's restrained eaters ate more after a break because the break had broken something. In the ordinary week, there's nothing to break. A biscuit doesn't violate a rule, so it doesn't trigger the might-as-well, so it stays a biscuit. The mechanism that drove every ending on the envelope has nothing to run on.