"It's been a hard day"

You get in late, after a day of being talked at. There's a row you're trying not to think about. Dinner is the first nice thing that's happened since breakfast. You eat it fast, have more, and finish with whatever's in the cupboard. For a little while, things feel softer.

Most people call this comfort eating, and most people who do it feel they understand it well enough. Feeling bad makes them eat. I want to give that its due and then complicate it, because the research here surprised me.

The part to grant is that food does comfort. Eating something rich and warm is pleasant, and pleasure takes the edge off a bad mood for a while. The ritual does some of the work too. You sit down, you stop, and something is provided for you. After a day of giving out, a meal is a moment of being given to. The need underneath is real. You're depleted and you want looking after.

Now the complication. A team in the Netherlands pooled 56 experiments, with 3,670 participants. In each, people were put into a mood in the laboratory and their eating was then measured. If sadness and stress simply drove eating, you'd expect people in a bad mood to eat more across the board. They didn't. Negative moods increased eating in one group, the restrained eaters. Those are people who habitually hold back and diet, the same group as in chapter 8. In other people a bad mood made no reliable difference. That included people who described themselves as emotional eaters. Good moods increased eating in everyone.

I'd be careful with this. A sad film clip in a lab isn't a terrible Tuesday, and the authors say the studies varied a great deal. But it suggests that the simple story is incomplete. What seems to happen, at least in the lab, is that a bad mood doesn't so much create an appetite as loosen a grip. If you spend your days holding your eating in check, a hard day uses up whatever you were holding it with. The rules go, and the "might as well" from chapter 8 takes over. On this reading, the hard-day extra is another product of restriction. It's one more reason for the policy of permission. If no rules are being held up, there's nothing for a hard day to knock down.

The other finding is worth a thought too. Good moods raised eating across the board. Celebrations, Fridays and holidays are at least as likely as misery to produce the extra. That matches most people's experience if they think about it.

So what about the real need, the wanting to be looked after at the end of a bad day? I'd ask what the extra delivers. The first plate is comforting, and I've no argument with a good dinner as a consolation. The extra adds a few more minutes of the same, at a fading rate, as chapter 3 described. Then comes an hour of feeling heavy and cross with yourself, and that's an odd way to treat someone who's had a hard day.

Better comforts exist, and you know what yours are. A bath might be one, or an early night. You could ring the friend who makes you laugh. A walk round the block in the dark would do, or a programme you love, or ten minutes of complaining to someone who'll listen. None of those is as close to hand as the cupboard, which is why the cupboard wins. It helps to decide in advance. Write down two things that reliably make you feel looked after, and on a bad day, have dinner and then one of them.

If hard days lead to eating that feels out of control, in large amounts, often, and with shame afterwards, that's beyond the reach of this chapter. Chapter 13 says where to take it.