The decision

You've got the argument and the method. What's left is to decide, and I'd like the decision to be one sentence.

I don't start diets. I eat three ordinary meals a day and I don't skip. When I've eaten more than I meant to, the next meal is an ordinary meal.

Three parts.

The first is the end of fresh starts. No plan, no Monday, no app, no rules. When the Sunday night feeling comes, and it will, you notice it and don't act on it. Chapter 4 says what it is.

The second is the ordinary week. Three meals, what you'd feed a friend, nothing banned, don't finish the plate if you're full, one list.

The third is the ordinary meal. After any slip, of any size, the next meal is the one you'd have had. No write-off, no compensating, no fresh start.

There's a form of planning that helps with rules like this, and it's been tested many times. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran reviewed ninety-four studies of it in 2006. You decide in advance what you'll do and when, in the form "when this happens, I'll do that", and people who plan that way follow through much more often than people who only hold the intention. So write three.

When I feel the pull to plan a new diet, I'll write down what I'm going to eat for the next three meals and nothing else.

When I've eaten something I hadn't meant to, I'll say "that was a biscuit, dinner's at seven" and have dinner at seven.

When I've had a big weekend, I'll eat breakfast on Monday at the usual time and the usual size.

What to expect. This is my expectation and not a finding. The first Sunday night without a plan will feel like doing nothing about something, and the feeling is uncomfortable and passes by Tuesday. The first two or three weeks of meals will be uneven, some large, and you'll have the thought that this is the free-for-all you feared. It isn't. It's the aftermath of the last diet, and it settles when no new one arrives. Around week three, a biscuit will happen and you'll say the sentence and have dinner and notice on Friday that there was no Friday. By week six, most people say that food takes up less of their day, that meals have a size, and that hungry and enough have started to show up as feelings again. The scales will do what they do. If you've been dieting for years, they may hold, or they may drift down slowly, or they may not, and the book has made no promise about them. What it promised was that the envelope would stop growing, and by three months it has.