"If it's down, I'm doing well"

This one's harder to give up, because it feels good. The number is down, and you were careful yesterday, and the two facts join up into a small glow that lasts until lunch. I'm not going to tell you the glow is bad. I'm going to point out that it's built on exactly the same noise as the bad morning, and that if you keep one you keep the other.

Everything in chapter 3 runs both ways. Less carbohydrate yesterday means a smaller fuel store and less water this morning. A lighter, earlier dinner means less in transit. A day with less salt means the kidneys have caught up. Skip the second glass and there's less fluid on board. Each of those takes the number down, and none of them is fat leaving. The good morning after a careful day is mostly the careful day's water, and it's back the moment you eat normally, which you will, and should.

There's research that seems to say daily weighing works, and it's worth seeing what it actually shows. Dori Steinberg and colleagues looked at 47 overweight adults in the intervention arm of a six-month weight-loss trial. About half weighed every day. The rest averaged just over five days a week. The daily weighers lost about six kilos more and took up more of the programme's weight control behaviours. That's a small secondary analysis, and everyone in it was in a structured programme with weekly lessons and feedback. What it shows is that over six months, in a programme, people who weighed daily did better. It doesn't show that any one morning's number meant anything, and it doesn't show that feeling good on the low mornings was part of what helped. If anything the mechanism the authors point to is the behaviours, not the mood.

So the good morning is as unearned as the bad one, in the sense that neither is telling you what you think it's telling you. That's my reading, not a finding, but I think the sheet from chapter 1 will back it. Find a good morning and look at what preceded it. Then find the morning two days later.

The reason this matters is that the glow is what keeps you stepping on. A habit that only ever hurt would have died. It's the good mornings that make the bad ones feel worth it, and they're made of the same water.