The corner of the lasagne again

Go back to the Wednesday in chapter 1, with a few things moved.

You've made the same big lasagne, and you've planned two meals from it. The dish stays on the counter. You serve yourself a square a little smaller than last time and sit down. The first few mouthfuls have your whole attention, and they're as good as you'd hoped.

Halfway through, you put your fork down and have some water, and someone tells you about their day. You pick the fork up again, because you're still hungry. A few mouthfuls from the end, the eagerness drops. You check, and find that you aren't hungry any more, and the rest is just still there. There's a small pang, smaller than it used to be. You think, "there'll be more tomorrow". You put your knife and fork together.

You get up and cut what's left in the dish into portions, corner included, and put them in boxes in the fridge. You put the kettle on. At half past eight you're on the sofa with a cup of tea, comfortable, thinking that was a good lasagne. Tomorrow at lunch, hungry, you'll eat the crisp corner, and it'll be better than it would have been tonight.

That's all the change looks like, and I don't want to oversell it. You'll still overeat sometimes, and sometimes on purpose, which is as it should be. The studies I've relied on are mostly short experiments on single meals. The method is my own assembly and untested as a whole. This book hasn't promised you a different body, and it doesn't promise one now.

What I'm confident of is the narrow claim I began with. The part of the meal after enough gives you little, because the taste has faded by then. The waste has already happened, and the fullness you're waiting for is on its way. Stopping feels like a loss mainly because you've learned to treat each good meal as the last. It isn't the last, since there'll be more tomorrow.

If you do one thing after closing this book, make it the pause. Halfway through your next meal, put your fork down for a minute and ask whether you're still hungry, or whether it's just still there. Then do whatever the honest answer suggests.