Wednesday, ten to four

It's ten to four on a Wednesday afternoon. You're working at the kitchen table, as you do two days a week, and an email has come in from a client. It's polite and it's unhappy, and it asks why something wasn't done that you thought had been. You read it twice. Your stomach tightens. You start a reply and stop.

Then you're at the fridge. You didn't decide to go there. You cut a few slices of cheese and eat them with crackers, standing at the worktop, looking at nothing. It takes about four minutes. You have a couple more crackers because the packet's open. You go back to the table.

The email is still there. It's exactly as unhappy as it was. You still don't know how to answer it. The only things that have changed are that it's five to four, you're slightly full, and there's a small extra weight in your chest that wasn't there before, which is the knowledge that you've done it again.

At half past nine that evening you're on the sofa. Your partner's out. There's nothing you want to watch. You're not hungry, you had dinner at seven, and you're in the kitchen with a bag of crisps. On Sunday afternoon, after a phone call with your mother that went the way those calls go, it was toast and peanut butter, two rounds, eaten at the counter with the phone still warm in your other hand.

None of this is a great deal of food. It's not a binge. It's a handful of visits a day, and they have a pattern. Something is felt. Food follows. The feeling stays. You've been trying to stop for years, mostly by trying to have more willpower, and it hasn't worked, which is one of the things you feel bad about while eating.

I'll use a few terms throughout. Hunger is the body's need for food. It builds slowly, it's felt low down, and it'll accept most things. The pull is the wish to eat when there's no hunger. It comes on fast, it's felt in the mouth and the head, and it usually wants one thing. The feeling is what's actually there when the pull arrives. On Wednesday it was dread about the email. In the evening it was boredom. On Sunday it was something between sadness and anger. The visit is the trip to the kitchen and what's eaten there. The after is what you feel when the visit's over, which is the feeling you started with, plus fullness, plus a verdict on yourself. And the ask is the question this book will put in the gap between the pull and the visit, which is "What's actually going on?"

The habit has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

You're not hungry. You often know it at the time.

It's fast, it's standing up, and it's not really tasted. If you sat down with the same cheese and crackers and a plate, it would be a different event.

It wants particular things. Nobody goes to the fridge in a state of dread and eats a raw carrot.

The feeling is still there afterwards. This is the thing to notice above all. The visit was meant to do something about it and didn't.

And the after is worse than the feeling was. You went in with dread and came out with dread and self-disgust, and the second is harder to bear than the first.

Try one thing before reading on, and don't change anything yet. For a week, each time you find yourself eating outside a meal, write down three things. What you ate, how hungry you were out of ten, and what you were feeling in the minute before. If you don't know the feeling, write "don't know". At the end of the week look at the hunger column.