Tuesday

It's a Tuesday, some months on. There was no Sunday night. There hasn't been one for a while, and you noticed that a few weeks ago and then stopped noticing it, which is how it should be. Breakfast was breakfast. Lunch was a sandwich and an apple and the second half of a conversation. At half past three there's a box of biscuits open on the desk at work, and you have one, and it's a biscuit, and then you go back to the thing you were doing. At seven there's dinner, the usual size, with the family, and afterwards a bit of the chocolate that's been in the cupboard for a week, because you fancied some, and there's some left.

The envelope is in the kitchen drawer. The last line on it is from February, and it says "day three, ended Wednesday, had lunch". Nothing since. You haven't weighed yourself in a month, and when you did, the number was what it was, and you noticed you didn't have a Thursday about it.

Your sister rang last week with the name of a plan. You listened, and were glad for her, and said you weren't doing one, and she asked why, and you said you'd done enough of them, and she laughed, and that was the conversation. At the office the January diet came and went, and you ate lunch with the people on it, and nobody minded.

None of this is a transformation. There was a weekend in March with a great deal in it, and you had breakfast on the Monday, and it was strange to, and you did. Food takes up less of the day than it did. Meals have a size. Hungry and enough turn up when they should, mostly. The blame hasn't been heard for a while, because there's been nothing to say it about, and you've noticed that a person who isn't called greedy every Friday thinks about themselves a little differently by the spring.

If you take one thing from this book, take this. The next time you eat something you hadn't meant to, say "that was a biscuit" and have the next meal at the usual time and the usual size. That's the whole method. Everything else is detail.