What the visits cost

You may think the habit costs a few hundred calories a day and some mild self-reproach. I think it costs more, and most of this chapter is my own reckoning. I'll say where a study comes in.

The feeling, untreated. Every visit is a feeling that didn't get dealt with. The email was still unanswered at five to four. The boredom was still there at twenty to ten. The Sunday sadness had nowhere to go. Over years, that's a great many feelings that were fed instead of answered.

The after. This is the real cost and the one you know best. A small unpleasant feeling goes into the kitchen and a larger one comes out. Multiply it by a few visits a day and it's a running low hum of disappointment in yourself, all day, every day. That hum affects how you feel about everything else.

The circle. The after is a bad feeling. Bad feelings bring the pull. Van Strien's chain from chapter 11, in which low mood and eating feed each other, is the version of this that's been measured. You've been living in the unmeasured version.

Meals. Crackers at four take the edge off dinner. Dinner, eaten without hunger, is less enjoyable. Some of the best eating in your week is being spoiled by the worst.

Evenings. An evening that's spent going to the kitchen every forty minutes isn't restful. You end it neither entertained nor rested nor fed, and slightly full.

The skill of comfort. If food is what you reach for when sad, the other ways of being comforted go unpractised. Ringing someone gets harder. Sitting with a feeling gets harder. The muscle you'd need in a real crisis is the one you've been resting.

Your belief about yourself. Years of visits and Mondays have taught you that you can't be trusted around food and can't manage your feelings. Neither is true. Both feel true, and that's a cost that reaches into things that have nothing to do with eating.

Money and teeth. Small, and real. Snack food isn't cheap by the gram, and eating between meals is harder on teeth than eating with them. I won't dwell on either.

Weight. I've put this last on purpose, and I'd rather you didn't put it first. Eating without hunger several times a day will, for many people, add up over years, and van Strien's study is one that found it. But this book makes no promise about your weight, because I can't predict it, and because a book that made weight the goal would put you back on a Monday plan, which chapter 12 argued is the surest way to more visits. If your weight is a health question, take it to a GP. The visits are worth ending for the other reasons, whatever the scales do.

In return for all that, you've had the first mouthful of the crackers, which was genuinely nice, and a four-minute break you could have had anyway. That's the trade, laid out. I'd take the other side of it.