JUST RIGHT

Why Listen to Me

For ten years I experimented with fasting. For four years, starting in 2004, I only ate every other day. On the days that I did eat, I did not hold back and ate what I wanted.

Then I would start to fast at about 8 that evening. I would eat nothing the next day and break the fast at about 8 in the morning of the day after that.

So I would go about 36 hours without eating anything. After that, I would allow myself free reign for about 12 hours. Then I would start another 36 hour fast.

After 2008, I fasted twice a week, usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays. At the end of 2013, I started to drift out of the habit of going without food for a day at a time. In 2014, I resumed eating at least something every day

Sometimes I would go a few days with only one meal. But for the most part, I rejoined the mainstream and ate at least two meals a day.

One thing that going without food did was make me very aware of the emotions and physical sensations connected to eating. I discovered that fasting wasn’t that hard. I noticed that on the fasting days the desire to eat would peak around 4:00 p.m. but disappear entirely after 8:00 p.m.

Going about my day on an empty stomach, I felt more alert than on the eating days. The word that comes to mind when I think of the physical sensations is clean. Freed from the burden of processing food, my body felt lighter and more flexible. The desire to move around was much greater than on the days when I ate.

I have never felt better than the mornings when I woke up after 36 hours without food. My body would feel like it was 18 again and I had lots of energy. I loved going for a run or to the gym on those days before ending the fast by eating breakfast. Sometimes I felt so good I was reluctant to eat because eating always brought me back down to earth.

I also discovered how important eating is as a purely social activity. A huge amount of our time and interactions with others have to do with eating. Eating is also a great source of pleasure in itself. These were the factors that caused me to end my experiment. But just sitting here remembering the benefits I experienced, tempts me to resume it.

As you might guess, fasting was very effective at keeping me lean. When I gave it up I was confronted with the challenge of keeping my weight under control while eating every day. This forced me to start paying close attention to what I eat and how much I weigh.

These adventures have left me with enormous respect for the human body. It is a miraculous machine. Clever as we are, I doubt human beings will ever create anything to equal it.

For example, the human body is very adaptable. My body easily and completely adjusted to the alternate day schedule. It picked up the rhythm and stuck with it so loyally that I felt uneasy even thinking about eating on the fasting day.

I discovered that the body is a superb calorie counter. It is very sensitive to bad food, too much food, and eating while in the wrong state of mind. I became very familiar with the signals it sends out when I am eating too much or a food is having a bad effect on me. I realized that if I feel crummy after eating, something is wrong and needs to be corrected.

The body provides us with lots of information about our eating habits. It sends out a variety of signals that, if we pay attention to them, can save us from ourselves. The default mode of modern life is to tune out these signals so that we are completely unaware of them. In the rare instances when they become so strong we can’t help but notice them, our default response is to either disregard them and barrel through or, thinking we have come down with something, seek medical attention.

How it Sits

Appearance, aroma, taste, and texture are the criteria that appear in restaurant reviews. Nutrition does not get a word. That’s forgivable because a restaurant meal is meant to be a pleasure and nutrition is not especially interesting to the foodie who’s reading the review.

Another quality, however, does deserve mention and that is how well the food sits in the stomach after it has been eaten. Some foods rest easy and leave a pleasant feeling that lasts for hours. Many others, however well they score on the aroma-appearance-taste-texture front, leave the diner feeling crummy in the hours after the check has been paid.

If the abdomen is uncomfortable after the meal, either there is something wrong with the food itself or the eater overdid it. Food combinations like meat and potatoes can leave us with a heavy feeling even if the portion is small. Highly processed foods like some frozen pizzas can irritate the stomach. But the most common cause of abdominal discomfort is simple overeating.

The Immobile Obese

Periodically there are news stories of massively obese people who weigh more than a thousand pounds. Special means are needed to take them to the hospital when their condition leads to complications requiring in-patient treatment. Typically these people live their lives entirely in a bed.

They are immobile. So they depend on caregivers for everything. I always want the reporters to interview these people but they usually get left out of the story. I’m not sure why because they are a critical ingredient in the phenomenon.

In one segment I saw, they laid out what the heavy person ate in one day. The spread looked like it was for a party. Not only was considerable effort needed to bring that volume of food to the bedridden person, a lot of money was going into buying it.

The overweight person certainly bears some responsibility for their own condition. But their enablers are far more important. I could not help but think that all these food fetchers had to do was bring only water for a while and the problem would be solved soon enough.

Think back to the days when humans had to chase and kill their meals. Could a situation like this ever arise ? Not likely.

Back then, the calories expended in the chase could easily exceed those consumed in the meal. But today, it is easy to take in many more calories than we have to expend in obtaining what we eat. All it takes is a few steps to the car plus a few more into the store. If a meal is not ready to eat, perhaps a few more calories must be expended in cooking it. And of course some effort is required to get the food into our mouths.

While the caloric cost of these trivial efforts is small, they are work nonetheless. When we overeat, we are like the bed-bound obese except we are both eater and enabler. We too are making an effort to be overweight. And, like them, all we need do to reverse course is dial back the work we do to stuff ourselves.

The Virtue of Inaction

We’ve read a thousand times that we should eat vegetables and exercise more. These two suggestions are good advice. In fact, there are many solid recommendations we have all seen many times. So with all this exhortation, why aren’t we making more progress ?

We just can’t get ourselves to do what our minds say we must. Why is that? Why can’t we get ourselves to do what we know we should?

We watch as our hand reaches into the potato chip bag over and over, even though we feel the negative feedback our body broadcasts as we plough through the big chips then turn our efforts to the smaller ones. The body senses the salt overload and sends unpleasant sensations warning us to stop. But we press onward through to the salty, corn flake sized fragments at the bottom of the bag and only stop when the last crunchy crumb is resting uncomfortably in our stomach.

We feel lousy after this experience. But we don’t learn from it. At least not for long. We may avoid potato chip bags for a day or two but we will soon find ourselves in the same situation again. Not everyone does this with potato chips. But almost all of us has had a similar experience with some food.

Our daily lives are full of this kind of mad self-torment. Over and over we find ourselves with abdominal discomfort and other unpleasant sensations. Yet we blow right past these warning flags our bodies wave in a vain effort to make us stop.

The answer lies not in action, but inaction. Our bodies tell us what we are doing is a mistake. All we have to do is stop repeating it.

We are no different than the 1,000 pound man lying in his bed. All we have to do is … nothing. We just need to reign in our food fetcher. Yet we override natural tendencies that could protect us from ourselves. And the irony is that we have to work pretty hard to do it.

People resort to surgery to shrink the volume of their stomachs. The FDA has approved a device that allows the user to drain part of their stomach contents into the toilet, a sort of bulimia without the barf. This is the insanity that we engage in rather than simply being still and doing nothing when the urge to eat more than we need possesses us.

So what is missing ? Why do we do this ? How can we unlearn this harmful behavior ?

The missing ingredient is attention to the feedback our body sends out when we eat. The signals are there. But we tune them out.

If we can be more attentive to the body’s own messages to us, we can dial down the effort that makes us fat and sick. We can abandon behavior that is unnatural and unpleasant. All we have to do is pay attention.

Just Right

Knowing when to stop is an underrated skill. Whether it is the best moment to conclude a conversation or when to stop putting food on one’s plate, the right time to stop can be easy to miss. If we stop a chat too early we may seem rude and disinterested in the other person. If we yammer on too long we can make them uncomfortable.

With eating, “just right” is the point where we have enjoyed the taste and texture of the food, are no longer hungry, and our stomach is neither too empty nor too full. If we stop eating at this point we will have had the maximum enjoyment from that particular meal. “Just right” is the bull’s eye of happiness.

The goal of this method is to be able to look back on every meal and feel it was “just right.” The taste and texture of the food was pleasant. The experience of eating it was pleasurable. Two hours later the flavor still lingers and the stomach is happy as it does its job.

Many things hamper us in getting the size of a meal just right. One major factor is simple insensitivity to the signals the body sends us. Fortunately, it is not hard to start paying attention.

Another factor is latency. There is an interval between the point at which we have eaten just the right amount of food and the moment when signals of satiety start to arrive. If we continue eating and wait for the feeling to hit us, we will overshoot. For this reason it is necessary to recognize when it is time to stop and wait for the physical confirmation that we have eaten exactly enough.

We can also learn to recognize this point where we should stop eating to hit the “just right” target. That doesn’t mean we will use that knowledge and actually stop. Knowing and doing are, after all, two quite separate things.

The Inescapable Choice

The toughest moment we all face is when we know in our mind that we have eaten enough and should stop. No matter what method we follow, we will inevitably come to a crossroads where we must choose between eating too much and stopping at the point where things will be just right. And we will face this choice several times every day until the nurses take over for good.

The fundamental problem we confront when this happens is our lack of inner unity. We like to think of ourselves as a single, consistent person. But a quick glance inward reveals a reality that is quite different.

The truth is that within each of us there is a bubbling cauldron of impulses competing for a chance to control our muscles. Much of the time we allow this competition to play out in the background. Habits run the show, weird urges are screened out, and things turn out ok.

The urge to overeat resides in us along with the desire to manage our weight. Pigging out is a very simple behavior rooted in the biological need for enough fuel and building material to keep the body going. Back when humans were wild animals like everyone else it made sense to overeat when food was plentiful because starvation was a periodic reality.

In contrast, the desire to hit the “just right” spot and keep our weight in a healthy range will always be weaker at the crossroads because it is an airy abstraction. The way to compensate for pig-out’s advantage is to recognize the mismatch and rig things in advance. If the pig-out path is steeper, or the just-right choice is easier, your odds of steering yourself around the temptation to binge will be better.

The Diary

The first step is to clearly see what you do now. Thanks to Steve Jobs, we have a wonderful tool to help us pay attention to what we are doing to ourselves. The smartphone’s camera and memory make it easy to focus on exactly what we are eating and how it is affecting us. With a smartphone and a bathroom scale anyone can see their own habits clearly.

Just take a picture of everything you eat and everything you drink. Everything means exactly that, everything. You need to take a snapshot of everything headed for your stomach. No exceptions. Eating “off camera” is your enemy. Don’t eat anything you have not photographed.

These pictures are not for Facebook. They are for you. You don’t need to share them with anyone. You are the only person who needs to see them. This is just between you and you.

It takes a while to get this habit going. If you forget, don’t beat yourself up about it. If you remember in time, take a picture of the empty plate. If all else fails, write down what you ate and take a picture of the list. The important thing is to stick with it despite the inevitable slips.

The diary is a new habit. Doing the make up work of photographing the empty plate or the orange peel is important to the process of building the habit of paying attention to the details of your relationship with food. This habit of attention is the foundation for additional habits that will come later.

Just pay attention and continue trying. Keep at it and the photos will start to accumulate. Right away you will be more conscious of your eating. Just the act of photographing what you eat will focus your attention on what is going on between you and food.

Once you have gone four days in a row where you have taken a photo of everything you ate, it’s time to start taking a picture of your scale. Weigh yourself and take a picture of the reading every day.

You want the conditions to be consistent. So weigh yourself as close to the same time every day as you can. Doing it at the beginning of the day is simplest. If you want to do it straight out of bed, the only confounding variables will be your night clothes and abdominal contents. You can exclude them by doing the weigh-ins naked and after jettisoning the accumulated liquid and solid waste.

Digital scales are easier to work with than scales with a dial. On a dial scale the needle may jump around as you try to take its picture. You may end up with 3 pictures, each of a different weight. Digital scales don’t have this problem.

You may find taking snapshots of your scale easier than photographing your food. You only need to do it once each day. So it’s easier to remember. But if you run into trouble, relax and use the same methods that you used to train yourself to take pictures of what you eat. Whatever you do, don’t stop altogether. Keep it going. Again, the photographic evidence of what is happening will start to accumulate.

Once these two habits are up and running, you will have a food and weight diary. The weight and the food consumption will be neatly and indisputably documented by date. You will be able to look back and see exactly what you have been up to.

The last step is to begin predicting what you will weigh the next day. After you have eaten the last morsel of the day and before you go to bed, ask yourself what you expect your weight will be at the following day’s weigh-in. Write it on a piece of paper and take a picture of the number. You could write it down in one of the phone’s apps, but I like the paper and picture method because it requires a little more attention. The act of writing on paper brings other brain regions into the process and helps to form a stronger memory.

Do this every day.

Your prediction will be the last photo of each day. This is the third habit. Without your realizing it, the photography and weighing you have already done have taught you something about how your food choices influence the number on your scale.

Some of this knowledge is unconscious. You will start to have an intuitive feeling as to what the next day’s number will be. Respect that feeling. Intuition and unconscious knowledge are the human version of artificial intelligence. The knowledge emerges without our being able to say exactly where it came from or how it was formed.

You don’t need to count calories. Every day your body is precisely measuring what you are taking in. Thinking about calories will never equal getting to know the physical feelings that the food you have eaten produces. Forget about calories until after you have mastered this method.

The intuitive knowing is what you want to perfect. Your body has had this skill all along. The picture taking and guesstimation are just a way to clear a path so you can be aware of it.

Getting these three habits going well takes a while. Don’t give up. There is no fast lane for this. Research suggests that sixty days of practicing a new habit are needed before it takes root.

Once the habits are entrenched in your routines, you can start to use this new knowledge to make a food budget for yourself. From the experience you have accumulated you will know how much you can eat if you want to lose, maintain or increase your weight.

Remember, the object at this stage is not to change anything. The point of the diary and the predictions is simply to watch yourself and see what is happening. Every day compare your prediction with the actual number on the scale at the next weigh-in.

Don’t criticize yourself. Just stick to the plan of documenting what you eat, what you weigh every day, and what you think you will weigh the next day. Keep it going and you will begin to know yourself much better than you did before.

No doubt what you see will be about what you expected. But the view of it will be clearer. You should start to see some patterns.

Be careful about trying to change anything at this point. The behavior you are observing has a lot of momentum behind it. It’s best to wait until later before attempting to alter it. But if you do try, keep the changes modest and don’t be discouraged if the results are disappointing.

Patience at this stage is critical. There is no quick fix. Even if you do succeed in making a massive change, unless you go through the process of building and maintaining new habits, you will relapse and the progress you have made will evaporate.

Just keep photographing your weigh-in, what you eat, and what you predict the next day’s weight will be. Your only mission at this point is to cement the habit of doing these things. For now the goal is just to see, objectively, what you are doing, to get familiar with how it feels, and to learn the differences between the days followed by a higher, steady, or lower number at weigh-in.

My Relationship with the Potato Chip

My earliest memory of potato chips is of the cans they came in. My parents were not wealthy and bought foods in bulk. I must have been in second or third grade and the cans seemed enormous. Childhood memories of size can be distorted. But this one is accurate.

The cans really were big. The company was Charles Chips. I found one of their cans, now a collectible antique, on Etsy. The seller says it is 13.5 inches high and has a diameter of 12.25 inches. That’s more than six gallons of potato chips.

The Charles Chips of that day delivered. A route man would regularly bring a new can. I can see the cornflake sized bits that were left at the bottom just before the new can arrived. But I cannot recall there ever being a stale chip. So we must have been working our way through those bins at quick pace.

I don’t have any memories of anyone else making withdrawals from this hoard. I’m sure I didn’t empty these cans alone. But I know I ate a lot of potato chips during that phase of my life.

No one had a second thought about a boy eating a lot of potato chips. Their power was well known. There was even a 1952 blues tune about them. But no one saw anything bad in it.

The idea of food coming in six gallon cans was, I think, an example of the idea of abundance that came after the depression ended and the great improvement in living standards that followed World War II became the new normal. The size of that effort provided a model for scaling up lots of things, including agriculture. Mechanization and chemical tinkering produced larger harvests at lower costs.

The privation of the depression was still an active memory for parents and grandparents. Supermarkets were organized to let everyone know we were in a new age of plenty. The piles of fruits and shelves lined with competing brands of peanut butter were there to reassure as well as sell.

Whereas before, hunger was something Americans met face-to-face, for the vast middle class it was now an abstraction featuring poor starving children in places very far away. We were told to think of our counterparts suffering in those places and clean our plates. I wondered how this might be helpful to them but that wasn’t the point. That instruction was the rear guard action fought by the “waste not, want not” ethic of the past on its way to irrelevance.

This abundance was an achievement. There were still people who didn’t eat well. But food stamps and welfare meant it was not food but truly hungry people that were scarce.

Hunger had been banished. There was a hidden cost, however, that people didn’t notice. Flavor and nutritional content were largely forgotten in the march to plenty.

Wonderbread, a staple that those who had experienced hunger were happy to have, is now an embarrassment. It is a perfect example of what was sacrificed in the transition to abundance. The nutrients and flavor of bread were left behind. It filled you up but that was it.

Having plenty to eat is now so taken for granted that there is a Netflix show called “Chef’s table.” It is a documentary series about creativity in restaurant kitchens. The age of abundance made this self-indulgence possible.

The very first chef in the series tells how he spoke with a plant breeder about perhaps coming up with a more flavorful squash. The breeder was delighted to work the problem. No one had ever asked him to use his talents to improve flavor. He wasn’t asked, but I bet he doesn’t get many requests to boost nutrients either.

The quality of the soil has declined as abundance has increased. The level of nutrients in the soil is much lower than before modern agriculture and this nutrient poverty affects the foods we grow as well. Now that virtually everyone in America is fed enough to get fat, perhaps it’s time to focus on nutrients as well as calories. And a little attention to flavor would be nice too.

Thanksgiving and Stuffing

Thanksgiving is the uniquely American custom. Air fares jump and the roads clog with families coming together to celebrate it. It has always been my favorite holiday.

You may have noticed that the marquee event of Thanksgiving is a big meal. The operative word is stuff. We stuff the turkey and we stuff ourselves. Eating until we can’t manage another bite is at the center of the ritual.

I hate to blame my favorite holiday, but I’m afraid Thanksgiving is responsible for America’s adoption of feeling stuffed as the national satiety signal. Being physically uncomfortable from a bulging stomach is our cue to stop eating. In fact, stopping before that point can leave us anxious that we haven’t eaten enough.

Another American habit rooted in this holiday is seconds. A Thanksgiving dinner where we don’t empty our plates and then fill them again with second helpings would seem odd. And we carry this habit over to daily life as well.

The era of abundance linked up with these American holiday rituals to put us on the road to obesity. The body tries to tell us it doesn’t enjoy being stuffed with seconds. Sitting may be uncomfortable after such a meal. If we go to bed too soon, we may experience acid reflux where the stomach contents and the organ’s digestive chemicals back up into the esophagus causing misery and the need for over-the-counter remedies.

The evidence is clear. We need to adopt a new, national satiety signal. America needs to relax. We are not on the verge of starvation and don’t need to store up fat for the winter. Stopping when our stomachs are not completely full is ok.

Being Hungry

In years gone by, Americans experienced real hunger. In many cases that hunger was part of long-term malnutrition caused by hardship. People knew hunger first-hand and didn’t like it.

Back then it made sense to tell children they needed to eat everything on their plates. People could not afford to waste food. Eating too much could not happen very often because there just wasn’t enough extra to make it possible.

When abundance came, Americans saw it as deliverance from privation. Cheap food piled high replaced the thin rations of earlier times. But the customs of the lean years have lingered long past the point when it stopped making sense to follow them.

We still think of going to bed hungry as something no one should endure. But the human body was designed to go without food on a regular basis. Missing a meal is not the end of the world. Nor is going a full day with nothing to eat going to do any harm to a healthy person.

Actually, fasting has a lot of benefits. The digestive system gets a rest. And, like a factory with no orders to fill, when the food runs out the body focuses on maintenance.

And no, a hungry body will not collapse if it doesn’t lie around waiting for a slice of pizza to revive it. Think about it. Did our ancestors react to hunger by lying around ? No, they went in search of food. They hustled for their next meal.

Actually, the feeling of being hungry includes a sensation of being clean and pure. If you go a full day with no food you may experience some periods of discomfort. You might get a headache for a while. But you will feel like our predecessors felt. Your muscles will itch to get out and do something. And the morning after a day of fasting, you will feel years younger.

You don’t have to do it for this method to help you. I’m just letting you in on the secret that you won’t die if you miss a meal.

Being hungry is ok. A reasonably healthy person will be absolutely fine if they miss a meal. An overweight person could actually do what nature planned and get by on their fat stores alone for quite a while, provided they have adequate water and electrolytes.

Snacking

Snacking is encouraged in America. But it’s not a great idea unless the snack food is a raw vegetable. Snacking between meals on chips and cheese crackers is a detour from the road to just right.

On the contrary, putting some space between meals with no snacks in between is exactly what we need to do. Giving your digestive system time to do its job and fully process one meal before shoving a new one into a still full stomach is actually a good idea. But you have to get familiar with the feelings that go with that and not panic when your stomach says it’s empty.

Telemetry

Rocket science is hard. Lots of money is still lost to mishaps in which the vehicle blows up, destroying its million-dollar payload. There is so much going on inside of the rocket that a catastrophic failure is easy. So a lot of effort goes into measuring what is happening within the rocket’s systems.

Rockets are filled with sensors sending information about everything that is going on. Computers use that data to keep the rocket’s processes on track. This data is also sent to mission control where the engineers monitor the propulsion and guidance systems. The term for it is telemetry.

The human body is a thousand times more complex than our rockets but it works the same way. There are lots of sensors and they provide information necessary for the feedback loops that keep its processes running smoothly. Most of this data flow is happening outside our awareness. But if we want, we can tune into the sensations coming from the abdomen and use them to better understand and manage our food consumption.

Tuning in

The biggest obstacle to tuning into the stream of sensations coming from the body is the blare of the modern world. The former champions of distraction, television and radio, have been replaced by the smartphone, the same device we are relying on to chronicle our eating.

Then there is modern humanity’s constant companion, anxiety. Anxiety is a feeling that can be useful. If you’re walking next to a cliff, a little anxiety about falling over helps to keep your mind focused on staying away from the edge. Anxiety has its place.

Life today is full of the social equivalent of cliffs. Lots of daily situations such as running late or forgetting something are anxiety-provoking. And so we walk around with a background level of nervousness that keeps us tense. It varies from person to person but nearly all of us have at least a bit of it.

These situations and our reactions to them consume a lot of our attention. It’s hard not to focus on them. But it is possible to redirect attention away from them to the signals coming from the body.

The techniques are really very easy and simple. You don’t have to become the Dalai Lama or spend a decade in a Buddhist monastery to benefit from them. The only real obstacle is just getting yourself to do them.

You can redirect your attention to the thousands of sensations happening in your body. They are always there and we can notice them any time we want. Our habit, though, is to ignore them unless we are in pain.

Yet it can be quite pleasant to let them in. The tuner, which isn’t that different from the dial on a radio, is our attention. We can focus it on the sensations coming from any spots on or in our bodies that are supplied with nerves.

There are lots of traditions, mostly from the Eastern cultures, that have taken the tuning in process to a very high level. Most of us are unlikely to pursue that degree of mastery. But there are a few basic things we can do that will still make a big difference in how we feel.

The first one is to simply feel your feet on the ground. The value of feeling the connection between our feet and the surface they walk on is something we know instinctively. That’s why the expressions “keep your feet on the ground” and “being grounded” make immediate sense to us.

Take a minute right now and feel the sensation of the bottoms of your feet touching the ground. Right away some of the oxygen of attention that has been keeping the fires of anxiety burning is diverted to the humble heels and toes of your feet. The power of distractions and anxiety is instantly weaker because you have shifted some attention to the simple, tactile messages coming from your own body.

The second thing is awareness of breathing. Don’t breathe for a minute and then take a breath. Pretty pleasant isn’t it? That’s because without breathing we would quickly be dead. We take it for granted and ignore it, but it is a pleasurable sensation and we can tune into it any time we want.

Again, diverting some attention away from the distractions and manufactured anxieties of contemporary life will rob those artificial cares and worries of some of their power. Anxiety has its place in social life just as it does on the cliffside. But a little anxiety is enough to motivate us to get out of bed and get our work done. We don’t need to have it blowing full blast 24/7.

So, now and then pay some attention to your breathing. Take a deep breath and then let it go. Try inhaling a little deeper. Try exhaling a little slower. Practice enjoying this fundamental necessity of life.

One you have focused some of your attention on the sensations of breathing and your feet touching the ground, turn it to other areas of your body. This is the third thing. The face, neck, and shoulders are favorite places for our anxieties to take physical form by tensing the muscles in those spots.

You don’t need to pay a masseuse to let these tensions go. Tensions are an effort. You have to scrunch up the muscles. That’s work. So all that is needed is to stop doing that work.

Turn your attention to your shoulders. Practice using attention like a searchlight to find the places where the tension is greatest. Then, while still feeling your feet on the ground and enjoying the sensation of breathing, try to let the tension go from the inside. Stop making the effort required to keep that muscle tense.

We have little or no training in how to do this so you may need to practice trying for a while before you get a feel for how to approach it. But have no doubt. You can do it.

The fourth thing to practice is stopping thoughts. The conversations that go on in our heads are part of the process of being anxious. Nothing can do more to decrease anxiety than to turn off that chatter.

Again it is a matter of stopping work that is harmful. But of the four parts of calming down, stopping the inner chatter is probably the hardest. Once again, the key is to redirect attention away from the process we want to stop.

Listen to the sounds around you. Just like the flood of sensation coming from the body, there is an ocean of sounds washing over us all the time. From the hum of the refrigerator to birds chirping outside the window, we are immersed in sounds that we tune out. Focus your attention on them and the power of your inner chatter will be weakened. Keep at it and you may experience the special quiet that happens when your mind shuts up completely.

Put these four elements together for just a few minutes and you can become significantly calmer. After just five minutes you will find you have settled down a lot. To the extent that your eating is partly driven by nervousness, simply calming down will help a lot to take the energy out of the urge to overeat for stress relief.

Use your smartphone as a reminder to take breaks to direct some attention to these four things. Set alarms with a gentle ringtone for 3 to 5 points during the day when you think you could take a few minutes to deliberately let go of your anxiety and tension. If the alarm rings when you absolutely can’t stop, reset it for a later time when you can.

It is surprisingly difficult to make a habit of this. For some unknown reason, there seems to be some very strong resistance to it. Anxiety itself is a barrier. Anxiety about some upcoming event can convince us we don’t have time to let go of some of it. Yet we will switch screens to look at some internet clickbait as a stress reliever.

There is no substitute for simple repetition. Each time you get yourself to do it, count it as a small victory. No matter how many times you miss a break, keep scheduling them. Keep trying to honor them. Again, this is something that is just between you and you. You are doing it as a kind gesture to yourself. And all of us deserve a little kindness.

This is something we all ought to know how to do. We should be teaching it to our children because it is an important life skill. If you want to pursue a bigger proficiency with it there are lots of paths to become an expert in mindfulness. But even the kindergarten level ability these simple steps yield is good enough for you to free up some attention you can then pay to the sensations around eating.

The Set Point and its Band

All kinds of things have to be just right for the human body to continue living. From its overall temperature to the acidity of the blood, conditions within the body have to be kept within a certain range. The result of keeping all of these values under control is called homeostasis.

Temperature is the example we all know. When we are well, the body is very successful in keeping our temperature close to 98.6 fahrenheit (aka 37 degrees centigrade). But there are lots of other variables that also have to be kept within certain limits as well.

Things may bounce around within a narrow range but they rarely slip outside of it. The body’s sensors constantly monitor them. When they stray toward the boundaries of their appointed band, processes are turned on and off to push the numbers back where they belong.

Again, temperature is the example we know best. We don’t have to think about it at all. It’s automatic. When we warm up too much we sweat and when we cool down too much we shiver. It doesn’t matter whether we want to sweat or shiver, the response switches on, like it or not.

The target value is called the set point. For temperature, 98.6 F is the set point. This number will vary slightly by time of day, activity, the temperature of the surrounding space, and how we are dressed. Its band is relatively narrow, about half a degree. Anything beyond that may be a sign of illness.

Suppose you go for a run in when it’s 30 degrees outside. You may be shivering when you start because the wind is pushing your temperature below 98.6. But after 20 minutes, the exertion has increased your temperature above the set point and you will have started sweating to lower it.

Back when we had to chase our food, hunger would stimulate us to pick some berries or sharpen a stick and go spear something. A full stomach would encourage a siesta.

Body weight in our time of abundance still works the same way. When body mass slips below the set point, we feel we should eat something. For us, however, food is always available and so it is our mental and emotional states that regulate our eating rather than the random swings between feast and famine that govern life in the wild.

Weight fluctuates in a band around the set point. If weight starts to drift lower, an urge to have a second helping of something surfaces. If weight starts to drift higher, the desire to eat subsides and we may skip a portion that we might otherwise take. This adjustment process is automatic and unconscious.

The problem is the set point for weight is not fixed like the set point for temperature. It can drift up or down. Unfortunately for us, this adjustment mechanism has become skewed to the upside. We are a little bored, so food becomes a form of entertainment. We may be sad or anxious and eat to soothe these feelings. We don’t move much and eat high calorie foods. The processes still work but, over time, the set point creeps up and the band around it moves higher with it.

The minute we try to follow a diet plan that involves a reduction in what we eat, the set point fights back. The mechanism sends out urges to make up for the missing calories and the next thing we know we are stopping by the refrigerator on the way to bed. It can even cause us to overcompensate and, after a brief initial success, we find the number on the scale is higher than when we started.

To achieve lasting weight reduction, we have to get the set point to move to a new level and stay there for the long term. Whipping it into line is fighting nature and does not work except for a select few. The effort has to be more of a steady, gentle pressure in a downward direction.

Portions Chosen by Others

A few years ago, I had my kitchen remodeled and ate in restaurants for the better part of a month. I was surprised to see my weight decrease but there was little mystery as to why. I was being served fixed portions. When I ate the last morsel and the waiter cleared the plate, that was it. Like a kindergartner who gets a small ration before nap time, the decision regarding how much I was to eat was out of my hands.

The bigger the distance between the executive decision about how much to eat and the actual act of eating, the more likely it is the decision will stand and not be overridden. In the kindergarten case, the decision is made far away from the action. In the restaurant, the management and the chef decided for me how much I would be eating if I ordered a particular plate.

I could expand it by ordering sides or a dessert but even in those cases, the portion was fixed. No bulging potato chip bag beckoned. My options for overeating were limited because I had not selected an “all you can eat” restaurant or a place that specialized in super-sized portions. They gave me my allotted quantities and that was the end of it.

When the remodel is done and life returns to its usual groove, the executive decision moves back to its usual perch just a few feet away from the spot where food gets shoveled and scarfed despite the best intentions. Open containers and ready spoons make breaching the flimsy barricades set out by the executive decision too easy. But well-tended habits can reinforce the boundaries and help to keep things under control.

The basic habit is to put a generous but not excessive portion on the plate then put the food sources away. The simple act of placing additional work in the way of second helpings may not always work. But it can help. When paired with a rule that you will wait five minutes after finishing before even considering another helping, the power of this habit can be impressive.

The portion should be big enough to leave you full but not stuffed. It is better to err on the high side. As you eat, enjoy the experience and pay attention to how you feel. Be alert for any feeling the serving was too much.

The Marginal Bite

For convenience I call the quantity necessary to see a change on the scale “the marginal bite” but it’s more like a marginal portion. With practice you can learn to recognize the single portion that crosses the line. It’s a skill that is not at all hard to learn.

The marginal bite is the quantity of food that is necessary to change your weight at the next day’s weigh-in by the smallest unit your scale registers. Subtract one marginal bite from your meal and your weight will be lower. Add one and your weight will be higher.

The scale I use is only accurate to a tenth of a pound. I am small so small increments like a few tenths of a pound are meaningful. For a normal sized person, getting this precise isn’t necessary. Accuracy to half a pound should be enough. Obsessing about small numbers will distract from the focus on getting familiar with the body’s signals. So don’t waste money on a super-accurate scale.

Trying to figure this out with your intellectual mind is hard. Every food has its own impact. Measuring the quantity and looking up the calories in a table is tedious and diverts attention away from the body’s signals. So, in general, I don’t recommend doing a lot of that kind of calculating.

The one exception is that looking up the calorie counts can be helpful in identifying what food you ate yesterday made the difference at weigh-in today. One time my own prediction was 1.5 pounds too low. I was really surprised. Then I realized I had eaten something that was unusual for me. A client had given me a watermelon and the night before I had eaten a very large portion thinking it was mostly water and probably not very calorie-dense. When I looked it up, however,I discovered that it doesn’t take much watermelon to add 100 calories to meal and I had eaten about 5 times that amount.

Nevertheless, simply observing over time you will pick up on what happens. Soon you will know intuitively how much of a particular food it takes to affect your weight. The knowledge will literally be in the form of a gut feeling.

All you have to do is watch carefully and you will eventually have a very accurate feeling for how different foods and different portions affect you. You will know when you should stop even if you still can’t bring yourself to actually halt. You just need to be alert to the feelings so you notice them when they appear.

Feeding Oneself

When we eat at home we do all the jobs that in a restaurant are done by the menu planner, chef, and wait staff. We also play the role of the guest. In a restaurant, the planner decides what goes in each dish. The chef prepares the food. The wait staff take our orders and deliver the dishes to our table.

When it’s just us, we mix these roles and the result is a stuffed guest. The problem is the guest has a tendency to choose unbalanced food combinations. The guest heavily samples the cooking while in the kitchen preparing it. In the place of a waiter bringing dishes the guest puts the pot on the table and ladles second and third servings onto the plate, stopping only when the pressure of the food already eaten becomes uncomfortable.

The more separation we can put between these roles, the better our chances of keeping the process within reasonable bounds. The more distance there is between the roles of meal planner and food-eater, the less manic the guest will be. If we plan the meal on Monday and only eat it on Thursday, the less opportunity there is for a feeding frenzy to affect what goes on the plate.

If we prepare the food, serve the plates and then put the remaining contents of the pot in the refrigerator, we have limited the guest’s ability to overeat by providing a fixed serving just like we get in a restaurant. We perform the waiter’s function of delivering only what the meal planner conceived. We can, of course, jump up, grab an extra ration of cookies and consume them in a frenzied state. But breaking up the roles and putting space between them makes this easier to resist.

If we have such a lapse it’s not the end of the world. We can try again the next day, and the next and at some point the balance of power will shift and the binging behavior will become more and more unpleasant. Firming up the boundaries between the roles will help.

Thinking about the meal is best done from a distance. The ideal would be to plan seven days of menus, think through what will be needed for each, and buy the ingredients the day we are going to cook it. For most of us this is way more organized than we are likely to ever be. But even if we are picking something up on the way home, we can still use the distance from the immediate moment of eating to make more deliberate choices.

In preparing the food we have a tendency to make more than we need. There is a fear of running short and there not being any second helpings. We can work on erring on the side of too little rather than too much. Remembering that we will not expire immediately if we are less than stuffed when we retire for the night is helpful.

Setting the table and plating the food before taking the first bite is a civilized act. In doing it we respect the part of ourselves that is the guest. It places an interval between the cooking and the eating. It gives us a chance to slow down and calm the frenzy. Making this step a regular ritual performed with reverence rather than simply attacking the food with the desperately shaking hands of an addict reaching for their favorite substance of abuse will change the overall experience and make it easier to stop when the right moment arrives.

Set out the entire meal at one time. Repeated trips back to the kitchen for each dish open the door to eating more than originally planned. If it is necessary to reheat a dish in the microwave while you are eating, that’s ok as long as you start with the full meal laid out in one place and don’t add anything.

Obviously, the key step is the plating. You want to develop a sensitivity to how much of each thing to put on your plate. If you try, you can imagine what you will feel after eating different quantities. This intuitive feeling is quite real and surprisingly accurate.

The body knows very well how it will feel after eating the quantity you are eyeing. You just have to be open to that knowledge and respect it enough to use it. You only need some practice to begin to master this skill.

Food Budget

Once you have tracked your eating and weight for a while, you will have a good feel for where your set point is. You will have an equally good feel for what your marginal bite is. You will have an intuitive sense of how much food over the course of the day will bring you up to the set point and how much it will take to push you past it or allow you to fall a little below it.

You want to get familiar with the feeling of one marginal bite less than what is needed

maintain your weight. The difference is subtle but you can find it. Being one marginal bite shy of maintenance feels like being just slightly empty.

You will also develop a feel for the tradeoffs you can make to keep your eating within your budget. For example you may have bacon at breakfast. Bacon is a really heavy food. So you will probably need to make up for that morning pleasure by not eating as much of something else in the evening.

By the way, bacon is an example of a food that should be a rare treat. Many people find the taste extremely pleasant. But from a health standpoint, bacon has a lot of minuses, starting with the way pork is produced in the US. It is so packed with calories that it can gobble up a big part of your food budget, crowding out other things you also like. Eating bacon daily will diminish your enjoyment of it. Having it as an infrequent treat instead will increase that pleasure.

Again, it’s no use trying to chop your maintenance budget in half to get quick results. You will almost certainly end up with a rebound that leaves you worse off than when you started. You cannot jerk your set point to a new level.

You want to move it gently by eliminating just one marginal bite. Just reduce your intake by the least amount necessary to show up on your scale. If you keep the reduction to just one marginal bite, the set point mechanism will barely register it and allow you to make it into bed without insisting you stop at the refrigerator first.

After a few days where you cheat the set point out of one marginal bite, the mechanism will push back and the temptation to load up will increase. You will experience impulses to pig out on something. If you give in, it’s not the end of the world so long as you resume the downward march the next day.

The set point may have won that battle but if you keep your resolve you will win the war. Eventually, the steady downward pressure will cause the set point to move and you will find yourself in a new band. It will become easy to stay below the old set point.

The body’s stabilizing mechanisms will now work for you in holding the new weight. Enjoy the plateau for a while before again reducing your daily food budget by one marginal bite. The process will repeat itself and eventually the set point band will downshift again.

What you want is slow, steady movement toward your desired weight. The process cannot be rushed. Be patient. Do not think of it as an ordeal to be endured and then escaped. You want this heightened sensitivity to be your normal, default state.

If You’re Not Hungry, Don’t Eat !

I think everyone has, at some time or another, watched themselves eat when they weren’t hungry. Whether from the force of habit or social pressure or just because it’s lunchtime, we sometimes eat even when our stomach is already full and additional eating brings on actual discomfort. Our body tells us enough already but we ignore its message and eat anyway.

The answer again is inaction. We just need to feel our full stomach and not make the effort necessary to eat some more. We may want to do something else to distract us from the thought of more eating. But as far as eating goes, we want to stand down and do absolutely nothing.

Sometimes it’s not as clear. Maybe we are not stuffed yet. We’re full enough but unsure how much more we should eat. The rule for this situation is easy: when in doubt, don’t eat. There will be plenty of opportunities to eat later.

Sometimes eating despite the digestive tract waving caution flags and stop signs becomes a habit. The only thing to do is to replace that misery-promoting habit with a better one. The feeling of fullness is the stimulus. We just need to insist on a new response.

I have picked tea as my response when I feel full but am tempted to eat more. I like it as a solution for several reasons. The first is that making the tea distracts me from the food. I like the warm feeling in my stomach when I drink it. And herbal teas generally calm me down whatever the situation. I cannot think of an occasion where this tactic failed to stop me from eating more.

Perhaps for you something else would be a better fit. Getting up and going for a walk would be a good substitute. Many societies have the custom of an after-dinner stroll. Research has confirmed that walking after a meal hastens the passage of food through the stomach. That’s why walking off a big meal eases the discomfort of being stuffed.

Just walking away from the food can work if you are able to stay away. Generally, this urge to eat despite being full does not remain strong for very long. So almost any distraction will do. If you can focus on something else for just five minutes you should find the itch to stuff will be a lot weaker.

Kindness and Reverence

This path to a better relationship with food is meant to be gentle. We have a tendency to be violent with ourselves when it comes to matters of virtue. It seems our default mode is to beat ourselves up for our failings. But the evidence is in. Being mean to yourself is not effective.

Just right isn’t only about satiety. It’s also about the pleasure we get from eating. The aroma, the texture, and the taste should be pleasing.

The problem is that our endlessly inventive agricultural-industrial complex has hacked our brains. My state, Virginia, maintains rest stops. They provide bathroom breaks and vending machines.

The machines deliver drinks and packaged snacks. The drinks, with the exception of bottled water and black coffee, deliver jolts of sugar and caffeine. The snacks deliver sugar and salt. Why are they stocked with these items? Because they sell really well. In 2018, the market research firm Packaged Facts estimated sales in 2017 were $24 billion and projected they would rise to $29 billion in 2022.

It is now pretty common knowledge that human beings are hard-wired to like salt and sugar. So it’s no coincidence that snacks packed with them are money-makers. They have become so embedded in our culture that the idea of bringing apples and carrots to snack on is considered dorky. It’s hard to find roadside food that isn’t sugar or salt focused.

Yet, if you really pay attention to how the body feels after consuming one of these “refreshments,” you will realize that the reaction to them is not that positive. As a potato chip abuser, I can tell you. The salt rush feels icky.

But don’t take my word for it. Do the experiment. Compare how you feel after eating a bag of salted peanuts or pork rinds and how you feel after eating a carrot. Really pay attention to the signals coming in five and ten minutes after consumption.

The same system of telemetry that keeps our weight hovering around the set point has other sensors that we also screen out. Our sense of smell and our taste buds tell us a lot about our food. The right food can send us delicious signals. But we have pay attention to them if we want to experience that enjoyment.

In the U.S., too much of our food is not just nutritionally bad, but not very appetizing either. We can change the experience of eating from the blind pursuit of feeling stuffed to the delight of eating just the right amount of something delicious. But potato chips and their ilk cannot do the job.

This conundrum is just one of many similar problems in our post-industrial age. We have all this stuff but it is not very helpful to us as we try to enjoy our lives.

Conclusion

Often the best treatment for a health problem is to simply stop the behavior that is causing it. It is our great fortune that we live so comfortably compared to our ancestors. Yet the same comforts can harm us if we embrace them too hard. We should, therefore, enjoy them judiciously, with gratitude and reverence.