Sweets, nuts, the cinema, the car, the children's packets and when it's more than a habit

The rule holds for every packet. A few need their own paragraph.

Sweets. The unit is the bag and the bag is a day's sugar, by the NHS's thirty-gram guide. A cup or a small dish is the bowl. Sweets don't go stale, so the staleness argument from chapter 9 has nothing at all to stand on. Buy the small bags or the ones that come in individual wrappers, because a wrapper is a partition, and Cheema and Soman's chocolates were controlled by exactly that.

Nuts. Good for you and eaten in tubs, and a tub of nuts is a sharing bag with a lid. The small pots, or a ramekin from the big one, and the tub back on the shelf. Nuts are the snack where "it's healthy" does the run's work, and a ramekin of healthy is still the right amount.

The cinema. The largest unit anyone is ever handed, in the dark, with a screen the size of a wall. Buy the smallest size they sell, or bring a small bag, and eat it before the film starts, in the light, looking at it. That's chapter 22 in a foyer, and it's the one place where you'll finish before the distraction begins by design.

The car. The bag in the door, opened at the lights, is the run with the road as the screen. Don't keep bags in the door. If you want a snack for the drive, a small bag on the passenger seat, and when it's gone it's gone.

The children's packets. The multipack of small bags for their lunchboxes is the unit this book recommends for you. Buy it for everyone. And the sofa rule applies to them more than to you, because a child who eats from a sharing bag with a screen on is learning the run at the age when units get set, and a child who's handed a bowl is learning something they'll keep.

Grazing. Some readers don't have a run so much as an evening. The cupboard visited six times between dinner and bed, a few of this and a few of that. The bowl still works, once, for one snack, and the rest of the evening is chapter 13's arrangement. Not resolutions. The cupboard door, the clip, and the bowl.

When the bag is a remedy. If the run happens because of how you're feeling, bored, flat, tense, sad, rather than because you fancy crisps, then the packet is standing in for something else, and two earlier books in this series are about that. The bowl still helps. It just isn't the whole answer.

When it's more than a habit. I said it in the preface and I'll say it again. If the run involves large amounts, with a sense of losing control, especially if it's followed by making yourself sick, using laxatives, or going without food to make up for it, please talk to a GP or to Beat. That's an illness, not a packet, and it has treatment, and a book about cereal bowls isn't it.