Before you start

This is a short book and you can read it in two or three sittings. It's about one habit, and the habit isn't eating. It's starting. Every few weeks you begin a new plan for what you'll eat, with rules and a first day, and for a while it goes well, and then it doesn't, and it ends, and the ending feels like your fault. A few weeks later there's another one. You've done this more times than you could count without a pen, and each time the blame has landed in the same place, which is on you.

I'm going to argue three things. The first is that the fresh start makes sense from the inside. It brings clarity and hope, the scale moves, and for a fortnight you feel in charge. The second is that the diet ended the same way every time not because you were weak but because that's how diets end. Restriction sets up the conditions for its own collapse. Merely planning one raises eating in people who diet. The hunger that arrives after weight loss is a hormonal state that lasts at least a year and isn't a lapse of character. And the moment the diet actually ends is not the biscuit. It's the sentence you say after the biscuit, and that sentence can be dropped. The third is practical. You stop starting diets. You eat three ordinary meals a day and don't skip, and when you've eaten more than you meant to, the next meal is an ordinary meal. Chapters 19 to 22 cover how.

This book takes no position on whether you should lose weight. That's between you, your body and, if you want one, your GP. What it argues is that the cycle you're in doesn't get you there and costs you a good deal on the way, and that the way out isn't a better plan.

Four cautions, and please read them.

If your eating involves large amounts with a feeling of losing control, or making yourself sick, or going long stretches without food on purpose, or if food and your body take up most of your thinking most of the day, that's not the habit this book is about. It may be an eating disorder, which is an illness with good treatment. The charity Beat and your GP are the places to start, and they're used to being asked.

If a clinician has put you on a diet, or you take medication for weight, follow them. Nothing here overrides advice from someone who knows your health.

If your weight is high and you have a health condition that goes with it, or you've been told to lose weight for a medical reason, this book still applies to the cycle, and the NHS route for losing weight is in chapter 16. In England you can refer yourself to NHS weight management services without seeing a GP first.

And if you're pregnant, or under eighteen, this book isn't written for you. Talk to your midwife or your GP.

The notes at the back give my sources and their limits. Where I'm giving my own reasoning and not a finding, I'll say so.