Category: Companions
Desk Drawer Audit
Food within arm’s reach gets eaten — not because you’re hungry, but because it’s there. Research shows snacks 20 cm away are taken far more often than identical snacks 70 cm away, and participants weren’t aware distance was affecting their behavior. By mid-afternoon, tired and often hungry, anything within reach is at high risk. This companion explores why distance matters, the arm’s reach test, what to curate if you must have food nearby, and the environment design principle for your future tired self. (3 min read)
Morning Identity
If you wake up not hungry, a person who listens to their body doesn’t eat. “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day” is a slogan with a long history — it has been advocated in those words since 1917 — and the science behind it is weaker than the phrase implies. Eating when you’re not hungry trains you to ignore the very signals you’re trying to cultivate. This companion covers what the breakfast evidence actually shows, why the habit persists, and how to tell morning hunger from morning routine. (4 min read)
Stress Inventory
When eating increases without explanation, stress is worth checking first — even if you don’t feel consciously stressed. A landmark 2003 paper proposed that chronic cortisol raises the pull of comfort food, and that the abdominal fat it builds sends signals that damp stress hormones — a self-reinforcing cycle. This companion explores why stress makes you eat, why naming stressors matters (it interrupts automaticity and opens alternative solutions), an inventory process for identifying hidden stressors, and what to do with the list. (4 min read)
The Free Food Table
You’ll walk past the office donuts six times today, and each pass reactivates the cue — food cues trigger dopamine in anticipation, and merely seeing food raises salivation and ghrelin. The solution isn’t to resist six times; it’s to make the decision once, early, and treat it as settled. That has a name in the research — an implementation intention — with a medium-to-large effect across 94 studies. But the form matters more than the resolve: plans framed as “I will not” rebound, while replacement plans (“I’ll keep walking to the coffee machine”) hold. This companion explores repeated exposure, the…
Kitchen Designer
The healthy-weight kitchen makes good choices easy and poor choices hard. Visibility is a recommendation; distance is friction. Research shows that simply changing what’s visible and accessible changes what people eat — without them noticing or feeling deprived. This companion explores why environment matters more than willpower, what should be visible (fruit, water, vegetables), what should require effort (trigger foods, large packages), the two-minute rule, and designing for your worst moments. (4 min read)
The Broken Window
If you keep breaking your eating window in the evening, you probably didn’t eat enough during it. The most common reason isn’t lack of discipline — it’s that earlier meals didn’t provide adequate satiety. Insufficient protein, carbohydrate crashes, accumulated stress, and sleep debt all drive evening hunger. This companion explores the usual suspects, the sneakier causes (cortisol, sleep, habit), and the diagnostic question that separates genuine hunger from something else wearing hunger’s mask. (3 min read)
Effort Barrier Check
What stands between you and eating your most tempting food? Probably less than thirty seconds — and that’s the problem. A 2019 Cochrane review of 24 availability-and-proximity studies found that moving food farther away reduces how much people eat, at a moderate effect size on low-certainty evidence, and it works below conscious awareness rather than by recruiting willpower. One study placed snacks at 20, 70, and 140 centimeters: both farther conditions cut intake, with no rebound in craving afterward. This companion covers why effort matters, the brain’s cost-benefit calculation, what does and doesn’t count as an effort barrier — hiding…
The Party Plate
Decide before you get there. Standing at a buffet with a plate in your hand is the worst possible time to make food decisions. Advance if-then plans have a medium-to-large effect on follow-through across 94 studies, and they help most exactly where a party sits, when getting started is the hard part. But the wording matters as much as the plan: negation-framed intentions can backfire through ironic rebound, so “I will NOT eat the bread” can increase both the thought and the behavior, while “if I’m near the bread, I take the vegetables instead” works. Write the skip list as…
Counter Scan
Your kitchen counters are a prediction. Visible food gets eaten more than hidden food — not because you lack willpower, but because visibility triggers consumption through nonconscious processes. What would a visitor assume you eat based only on what they can see? This companion explores why visibility matters, the counter as a self-portrait of your defaults, a four-part audit of what’s currently displayed, and a practical redesign to curate what’s visible so the environment works for you. (4 min read)
Why Fasting Works
Fasting and chronic calorie restriction create different hormonal environments. Restriction signals scarcity, triggering the body to slow metabolism and conserve energy. Fasting triggers the opposite — norepinephrine rises, growth hormone surges, insulin drops, and the body mobilizes stored fat while keeping metabolic rate stable or elevated. On that model the difference is not in the calories but in the hormones — an argued framework rather than a settled one. This companion explores the calorie restriction problem and metabolic adaptation, the hormonal cascade that makes fasting different, what the measured contrast between the two actually shows, and why meal timing matters…