"Planning it makes me stronger"

The Sunday night is the part of the cycle you'd defend most. The planning, the shopping, the clear fridge. It feels like getting ready, and getting ready is what sensible people do.

Dax Urbszat, Herman and Polivy tested this in 2002 with an experiment I find hard to forget. They told some participants that they'd be dieting for the coming week, and told others nothing. Then, right away, everyone did a taste test, before any diet had started. Among people who weren't habitual dieters, the news made no difference. They ate the same either way. Among restrained eaters, the ones who'd been told a diet was coming ate significantly more than the ones who hadn't, and more than either group of non-dieters. Merely planning to diet made them eat.

Look at your own Sunday. The plan is made, the fresh start is tomorrow, and tonight is what? For most readers of this book, tonight is a last supper. The takeaway, the rest of the wine, the thing you won't be allowed from tomorrow, eaten because it won't be allowed. The Sunday night eating isn't a lapse before the diet. It's the diet's first effect, arriving a day early, exactly as it did in the laboratory.

That's why I'd put the fresh start inside the cycle rather than at the front of it. It's not the moment the cycle is broken. It's the moment the cycle starts its next lap, and it starts with eating. A person who never planned a diet wouldn't have had the Sunday night, and a person who's planned dozens has had dozens of them, and each one was recorded, when it was recorded at all, as the last night of the bad weeks rather than the first night of the diet.

None of this means planning is bad. Planning meals for the week is a fine thing to do, and the ordinary week, later, has a shopping list in it. What it means is that planning restriction has an effect before the restriction begins, and that effect runs the wrong way, and you've felt it on every Sunday night on the envelope.