"Life without it would be grey"

If you've followed the argument so far, you may have started to feel uneasy. It's the unease people feel when something they rely on is under threat. Without the tin, elevenses would be just a cup of tea. The afternoon would have nothing in it to look forward to, and you'd get through the bad evenings with no help at all. You picture a life that's correct and joyless, in which you eat an apple and resent it.

I'd feel the same if that were what I was proposing. It isn't, and this chapter explains why I think you'll end up with more pleasure from sweet things than you have now.

Start with how much pleasure the current arrangement delivers. Go back over Thursday. The two digestives were eaten standing up while the tea cooled, and they were gone in a minute. The chocolate bar went in four bites while you read an email. You didn't taste the last two of the four biscuits on the sofa. You ate seven sweet things that day and properly enjoyed perhaps two mouthfuls. The habit looks like indulgence, but as a way of getting enjoyment out of sugar it's very inefficient.

Compare that with the last time you really enjoyed something sweet. It may have been a pudding in a restaurant, or a slice of a friend's homemade cake, or a particular pastry from a bakery on holiday. You were probably sitting down, and you'd looked forward to it and were paying attention. You can likely remember it now, which you can't say of any biscuit from the tin this month.

The rule in this book keeps that second kind of eating and drops the first. You'll still have pudding. You'll have chocolate after dinner if you like chocolate. What goes is the distracted, standing-up, between-meals kind, which was never providing much.

There's also some evidence that the pleasure improves when there's less sugar overall. Paul Wise and colleagues at the Monell Chemical Senses Center ran a small trial in which one group of volunteers cut the sugar in their diet by 40 per cent for three months and another group carried on as usual. Every month both groups tasted the same set of puddings and drinks, made with varying amounts of sugar, and rated how sweet each one was. By the second month, the group eating less sugar rated the puddings as sweeter than the other group did. By the third month they rated them as about 40 per cent sweeter. The puddings hadn't changed, so the change was in how the volunteers tasted them.

I should give you the limits. It was a small study, with thirteen people completing the low-sugar diet. The shift showed up in the puddings and not in the drinks. And the volunteers didn't come to find sweet things less pleasant, or to prefer less sweet versions, within the time measured. So I can't promise that you'll lose your taste for sugar. The study suggests a more modest change. When you eat less of it, you taste sweetness more strongly, so you get more effect from a smaller amount. People who cut down commonly report that a biscuit they used to eat without noticing now tastes almost too sweet. That's their report and not a research finding, but it points the same way.

The fear of greyness assumes that the tin is currently brightening your days. If you look honestly at last Thursday, the afternoon had a dip in it that the chocolate helped cause, and the evening ended in self-disgust. There wasn't much brightness to lose. You also won't be giving up tea breaks, or company, or stopping work for ten minutes, or comfort on bad days. All of those stay, and chapter 15 is about making them better.