This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
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Every diet is hard
A couple of years ago, I noticed that I was on a bad trend. Every day, I would commit to only eating one or two cookies, instead of five, or one scoop of ice cream, instead of three.
Then, every day, I would eat more than I should, often more than I had the previous day.
So I tried a sugar fast. Three weeks, zero desserts.
For the first few days, it really, really sucked. My energy plummeted, and I felt hungry all the time. After about a week, though, I started to feel better!
But it still sucked.
My wife is an exceptionally talented baker. Over the span of that three week sugar fast, she produced at least three different kinds of baked goods, and I couldn’t have any.
When it was time to break my sugar fast, I did it with a brown butter, salted chocolate chip cookie, fresh from the oven. It was the best thing I had ever tasted in my life.
A week later, I was right back to where I was before the sugar fast. Eating too much of everything, gaining weight, feeling crappy, and losing hope.
One day, my wife made a batch of home-made, bite-sized chocolate cream puffs. The first one was unbelievably delicious. Perfectly smooth, sweet créme diplomate completely filled a flakey, buttery pastry shell that was so light it almost felt like you weren’t holding anything.
By the eleventh one, I couldn’t even taste them anymore.
The next day, in desperation, I decided to try something different. I vividly recalled my maddening experience from the night before. The first bite had been heaven. The last bite had been hell.
So I created the One Bite Rule.
It was very simple. Every day, I could have one bite of a dessert. Any dessert! But only one bite.
It went even better than I expected. I found myself looking forward to choosing what my One Bite would be. And then when I ate that One Bite, I fully appreciated it, with zero anxiety or guilt.
After just a couple of days, I started to feel better, and within a week, I was losing weight.
Food, and especially dessert, had become a joy again.
I was so enthusiastic about this success that I started to tell people about it. Invariably, they would say, “That sounds way too hard for me.”
But every diet is hard!
Sugar fasts are hard because they require a lot of discipline, and they shut out a lot of delicious, wonderful experiences with food. So too with any other categorical restriction.
And if you’re in the habit of overindulging, which, let’s be honest, almost all of us are, the hardest diet of all is the one where you eat whatever you want and as much as you want all the time. It’s just that the hardness of that diet comes in the form of a much worse and much shorter life.
By contrast, the One Bite Rule is only hard for a moment — that one moment of discipline it takes to stop after the first bite of something delicious.
And the reward for that one hard moment? Peace, confidence, health.
Not a bad bargain.
