"I'll be good from Monday"

Every few weeks the after builds up into a resolution. From Monday, no snacks. Nothing between meals. Perhaps a proper diet this time, one with a name. You feel better the moment you decide, and for a few days it holds, and then a Wednesday email arrives.

I'd like to show you why this makes things worse, because I think it's the least obvious thing in the book and the most important.

Go back to the Evers meta-analysis from chapter 3. Across fifty-six experiments, being put in a bad mood didn't increase eating in most groups. It increased eating in one group, and that was people restraining their eating, meaning people who were trying to eat less than they wanted. In other words, the people whose feelings most reliably sent them to the food were the people on a diet. The restraint didn't protect them from the visit. It was the thing that made the visit likely.

There's a good deal of older research behind this, and it points the same way. When you're holding yourself to a rule about food, the rule takes effort, and a bad feeling uses up the effort, and the rule breaks, and once it's broken the collapse from chapter 11 follows. A person with no rule has nothing to break. They have a bad feeling and a fridge, and a decision.

So the Monday plan does three things, all unhelpful. It puts a rule in place that a feeling can break. It makes every visit a failure of the rule and so feeds the after. And it usually involves eating less at meals, which produces real hunger in the afternoon on top of the pull, so that you're now dealing with both.

I'm not going to offer you a better diet, because this isn't a diet book and it has no view about your weight. I'm going to offer you the opposite of a diet, which is permission. You may eat anything. Nothing is banned. Meals are eaten in full, sitting down, until you've had enough. If you want cheese and crackers with lunch, have them with lunch. What changes isn't what you're allowed. It's that when the pull arrives without hunger, you ask what's going on before you answer it with food.

That's a much smaller change than the Monday plan, and it's one a feeling can't break, because there's no rule to break. On the Wednesday when the email arrives, you're not a person on a diet being tempted. You're a person who wasn't hungry, noticed the pull, and asked. If you then eat the crackers anyway, you've broken nothing. You've collected some information.

I'd ask you, gently, to stop having Mondays. They've cost you a great deal and given nothing back. A person who eats when hungry, enjoys their meals and asks a question when the pull comes has no need of them.