"Well, the day's ruined now"

The after has a sentence in it, and the sentence causes more visits than any feeling does. It's ten to four, you've had the crackers, and you think something like "Well, that's today gone." The day has been spoiled. You may as well have the rest of the packet. Tomorrow you'll be careful.

I want to take that sentence apart, because it's doing all the damage.

First, what happened. You ate some cheese and crackers. It was perhaps three hundred calories, if you count such things, and I'd rather you didn't. It's a snack. The day contained lunch and will contain dinner, and it isn't measurably different from a day in which you didn't have the crackers. Nothing has been ruined. A small unplanned thing occurred.

Second, where the sentence comes from. It comes from a rule you've been running, which is that a good day is one without visits. Under that rule, a single visit turns a good day into a bad one, and once a day is bad, further visits cost nothing, because it can't get worse. It's the logic of someone who's dropped a plate and decides to drop the rest of the set. I think you'll recognise it, and I think you'll see that the rule creates the collapse. Without the rule, one visit is one visit, and the second is an entirely separate decision.

Third, what the after does. Tatjana van Strien and colleagues followed nearly six hundred parents for five years and found, in the mothers, that low mood went with more emotional eating, and emotional eating went with gaining weight, in a chain. That's one study and it's about weight, which this book isn't. I mention it for the shape of the chain. Feeling bad leads to the visit, the visit leads to the after, and the after is a kind of feeling bad. It's a circle, and the after is the part you can break, because it's made of a sentence.

Here's what I'd replace the sentence with. "I wasn't hungry and I ate. What was I feeling?" That's it. No verdict. The visit becomes a piece of information about what was going on at ten to four, and the information goes in the notebook, and the day continues. Dinner is at seven, as it was going to be. Nothing is made up for and nothing is skipped.

This will feel too easy, as if you're letting yourself off. But look at what the harsh version has achieved over the years. It has never once produced a good day. It has produced hundreds of ruined ones, each ruined by a single snack and a sentence. Kindness here isn't softness. It's the only thing that stops the second visit.