Notes
This book gives general information. It isn't medical, dietary or psychological advice, and it's no substitute for a doctor, dietitian or therapist who knows your situation.
I've kept sources out of the chapters so they read easily. Here they are by chapter, with the limits I'm aware of. Where a chapter isn't listed, it rests on my own reasoning. That includes the split between enough and the extra in chapter 1, and the list of payments and costs in chapter 2. It also includes the argument about where waste happens in chapter 4.
A general caution applies. Most experiments on eating measure one meal, in a laboratory, often with students, and the food is whatever suited the researchers. They show what pushes intake up or down at a sitting. They're much weaker evidence about what happens over months in a person's own kitchen. I've also left out some well-known studies on purpose. Several famous experiments on portion cues and "mindless" eating came from a laboratory whose work was later found to be unreliable, and a number of its papers were retracted. I haven't used any of them.
Chapter 3. Rolls, Van Duijvenvoorde and Rolls, "Pleasantness changes and food intake in a varied four-course meal", Appetite 5, 1984, pages 337 to 348. Hetherington, Rolls and Burley, "The time course of sensory-specific satiety", Appetite 12, 1989, pages 57 to 68. The participants in the second study were women of normal weight who weren't dieting. The first description of the effect in people is Rolls, Rolls, Rowe and Sweeney, "Sensory specific satiety in man", Physiology and Behavior 27, 1981, pages 137 to 142.
Chapter 4. Robinson, Aveyard and Jebb, "Is plate clearing a risk factor for obesity? A cross-sectional study of self-reported data in US adults", Obesity 23, 2015, pages 301 to 304. The participants were mostly young, with an average age of 31, and 60 per cent were men. The view that the clean-plate rule teaches children to stop by the plate and not by their appetite is a common one among researchers. I haven't cited a study for it.
Chapter 5. Cummings and Overduin, "Gastrointestinal regulation of food intake", Journal of Clinical Investigation 117, 2007, pages 13 to 23. Robinson, Almiron-Roig, Rutters, de Graaf, Forde, Tudur Smith, Nolan and Jebb, "A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the effect of eating rate on energy intake and hunger", American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 100, 2014, pages 123 to 151. One of the authors worked for a food company's research centre. The description of enough as a drop in eagerness is mine.
Chapter 6. Rolls, Morris and Roe, "Portion size of food affects energy intake in normal-weight and overweight men and women", American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 76, 2002, pages 1207 to 1213. Hollands, Shemilt, Marteau, Jebb, Lewis, Wei, Higgins and Ogilvie, "Portion, package or tableware size for changing selection and consumption of food, alcohol and tobacco", Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2015, issue 9, CD011045. The review covered 72 studies in all, most of them American, and judged them to be at unclear or high risk of bias. The reviewers weren't sure that shrinking portions that are already small works as well as shrinking large ones. Geier, Rozin and Doros, "Unit bias: a new heuristic that helps explain the effect of portion size on food intake", Psychological Science 17, 2006, pages 521 to 525.
Chapter 7. Robinson, Aveyard, Daley, Jolly, Lewis, Lycett and Higgs, "Eating attentively: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the effect of food intake memory and awareness on eating", American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 97, 2013, pages 728 to 742. The idea of attending to the opening mouthfuls and the halfway pause, and not the whole meal, is mine.
Chapter 8. That losses weigh more than equal gains is a standard finding in the psychology of decisions, associated with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. Applying it to food on a plate is my step, as is the point about childhood scarcity. Urbszat, Herman and Polivy, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we diet: effects of anticipated deprivation on food intake in restrained and unrestrained eaters", Journal of Abnormal Psychology 111, 2002, pages 396 to 401. Herman and Mack, "Restrained and unrestrained eating", Journal of Personality 43, 1975, pages 647 to 660. The wider argument is in Polivy and Herman, "Dieting and binging: a causal analysis", American Psychologist 40, 1985, pages 193 to 201. These were laboratory studies of a single eating occasion. The policy of permission follows from them but wasn't tested in them.
Chapter 9. Ruddock, Brunstrom, Vartanian and Higgs, "A systematic review and meta-analysis of the social facilitation of eating", American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 110, 2019, pages 842 to 861. Only two of the studies examined why the effect happens.
Chapter 10. Evers, Dingemans, Junghans and Boevé, "Feeling bad or feeling good, does emotion affect your consumption of food? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence", Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 92, 2018, pages 195 to 208. The reading of a bad mood as loosening a grip, not creating an appetite, is close to the authors' own but the wording is mine.
Chapter 11. Lowe and Butryn, "Hedonic hunger: a new dimension of appetite?", Physiology and Behavior 91, 2007, pages 432 to 439. The questionnaire is described in Lowe and others, "The Power of Food Scale: a new measure of the psychological influence of the food environment", Appetite 53, 2009, pages 114 to 118. The argument that shame makes the habit worse is mine, built on the studies under chapter 8.
Chapter 12. Plans in "when, then" form are from Gollwitzer and Sheeran, "Implementation intentions and goal achievement", Advances in Experimental Social Psychology 38, 2006, pages 69 to 119. The six-part method as a whole is mine and hasn't been tested as a package by anyone.
Chapter 13. The description of binge eating disorder and the advice to see a GP follow the NHS page on the condition, read in September 2026. It's written for England, and services differ elsewhere.