Eating past full, and the session you skipped

Both of these are all-or-nothing problems wearing different clothes.

The plate first. You stopped being hungry somewhere around the middle, and you carried on, and the reasons you gave yourself afterwards were about willpower or greed. They are usually about neither. Stopping while food remains feels like giving something up — the last good mouthfuls, the money, the effort someone put in — and that sense of loss is what the extra is really answering. Nobody has ever been talked out of it by being told to eat more slowly.

The exercise next. Twenty-five minutes on a Tuesday is not the problem. The problem is the rule that says a session under forty minutes is not a session, so a Tuesday with only twenty-five in it becomes a Tuesday with nothing in it, and then a fortnight, and then the standing opinion that you are someone who does not exercise any more. Ten minutes is not a compromised version of the real thing. It is the thing, and it is the only version that survives a bad week.

The third book belongs here for the same reason: the appointment you have not made is being postponed until you can face the whole of it, and it keeps being the whole of it because you have not made the call.