"The kitchen's right there"

Some visits have no feeling in them worth naming. It's half past nine, the crisps are in the cupboard, and the cupboard is on the way from the sofa to the kettle. Nothing happened. You ate them because it was half past nine and they were there.

That's a matter of setting, and it deserves a chapter of its own, because the ask won't help much with it. You can't name a feeling that isn't there. What you can do is change the route.

I'll keep this short, because it's practical and not deep, and it's my own suggestion. Some of the visits are triggered by seeing or passing food, and those can be reduced by not seeing or passing it. That doesn't mean banning food from the house, which is a diet by another name. It means that the crisps don't live at eye level in the cupboard you open for tea bags. It means the fruit bowl is on the table and the biscuits aren't. It means that when you work at the kitchen table, you sit with your back to the fridge, or work in another room two days a week.

There's a difference between food you keep in the house and food you keep in the way. Keep whatever you like in the house. Just don't leave it where the evening route runs.

There's also the matter of what a setting has been taught. If you've eaten crisps on the sofa at half past nine for a year, the sofa at half past nine has become a cue, the way the cinema is a cue for popcorn. The cue fires whether you're bored or not. The way to unteach it is to sit there a few evenings and not eat, and the cue weakens. It helps to give the hands something to do for those evenings. A cup of tea does most of the work.

And the route matters at work too. If the fridge is between your desk and everything else, put the kettle somewhere it isn't. If there's a bowl of sweets on a colleague's desk, take the other way round. None of this requires willpower. It requires moving a bowl.

One caution. This chapter is not the answer, and I'd be wary of anyone who says it is. Moving the crisps removes the visits that were about the crisps being there. It does nothing for the Wednesday email or the Sunday call, because those visits would find food in any cupboard. For those, the ask is the answer, and chapters 15 to 17 are where it lives.