"A good morning earns something, a bad one has to be paid for"

This is the settling up, and it's where the swing stops being a mood and starts being a meal. A bad morning and breakfast becomes optional. Lunch gets smaller. You add a walk you didn't want, or skip the thing you'd planned to enjoy. A good morning and something is allowed, the biscuit, the second helping, the takeaway you'd have felt bad about yesterday. The number has become a ledger, and you're paying it off or spending its credit before nine.

Two things are wrong with this. The first you already know from chapters 4 and 5. The bill is for water and the credit is for water, so you're skipping breakfast to pay for Saturday's salt and eating cake on the strength of a drained fuel store. The second is what the settling up does over time, and there's research on that.

Virginia Quick and colleagues surveyed 2,287 young adults, average age twenty-five, and found that those who weighed a few times a week or more were more likely to be dieting, more likely to use both sensible and unhealthy ways of controlling their weight, and, among the women, more likely to report binge eating. That's a cross-sectional survey, so it can't say which came first. Dianne Neumark-Sztainer and colleagues followed 2,516 adolescents for five years, and there the order is clearer. Girls who weighed frequently at the start were more likely, five years later, to be using unhealthy weight control and to be binge eating, after adjusting for what they were doing at the start. In the younger girls, frequent weighing predicted weight gain, not loss. Boys showed none of it.

These are studies of young people and they're about frequency of weighing, not about the settling up as such. But I think the mechanism is visible in your own week. Skip breakfast for a bad morning and you're hungrier at four, and the eating at four is bigger than the breakfast was, and tomorrow's number is up, and you skip again. That's the shape those surveys are describing, and it's the shape a scale used as a ledger produces.

If the thing you reach for after a bad morning is food, or the thing you reach for after a good one is food, then the number has become the trigger for eating that has nothing to do with hunger. Eat when you're hungry, in this series, is about that, and The feeling will pass without help is about the reach itself. And if the settling up has hardened into a diet you start and abandon, Breakfast isn't the problem is the book.

The alternative isn't to stop caring what you eat. It's to stop letting a number made of water decide it. Breakfast is breakfast. It doesn't owe the scale anything.