Don’t you love to treat yourself every now and then with your favorite snack? I sure do, there’s no denying that. But do I do it? That’s a much more complicated affair, one that deserves an explanation.
Let’s start by talking about how that feels. We are hardwired to feel good when we eat high-calories food, it gives us energy, which in turn increases our survival chances in nature. The thing is, we don’t live in nature anymore, our needs are different.
Food still feels good, though. Especially in the first moments, the ones that happen in the mouth. The natural order is respected: the contact, the flavor, the immediate and uncomplicated satisfaction of tasting something your body wanted. Up until this point, absolutely nothing wrong has happened. Biology is rewarding us.
Now it gets complicated. What if we keep eating until well past the satisfaction of our hunger? Well, the body tells us something is wrong. That feeling of fullness in your belly, the boredom of your mouth; in the end, we find ourselves in a place where we don’t want to be.
That’s where the guilt lives. Not in the first bite; in the fifteenth, when you start loathing yourself because you fell for it again.
It took years and therapy to understand why food became what it became for me. The honest and depressing answer: it played a role that something else should have played, but my mind likes to play tricks on me.
Food was something to think about, something to anticipate, something worth looking forward to. In a daily life that had no hobbies, no deep friendships, no particular direction — food was an event. A reliable one, I might add. It wouldn’t cancel on you, wouldn’t ignore you, wouldn’t make you feel like you were on the outside of something everyone else understood.
Video games did something similar, but differently. The games were a mental escape — a world I could enter that was better than the one I was in, with rules I understood and progress I could measure. Food was more physical, more immediate. A compensation for the bad things that had happened that day, a small reward for having survived another round of something I didn’t particularly enjoy.
Both were refuges. One for the mind, one for the body. Between the two of them, I didn’t leave much space for anything else.
There’s a difference, I’ve learned, between eating badly out of boredom and eating badly out of loneliness — though in practice they were often the same thing for me, because boredom and loneliness were fundamentally linked.
The absence of people creates silence. The absence of interests fills that silence with nothing. Between the two, I ended up in my room with too much time and not enough reasons to use it well, and the kitchen was always right there.
What I noticed in the most recent months, though, is that eating alone and eating in company are two different things, at least for me.
My problem is with eating alone at home outside of the meals. Twenty grams of chips become the whole bag, not because I’m hungry but because my hand becomes too hard to stop. Furthermore, one concession leads to another with relentless reliability. If I give in my desire today, it’s going to come back stronger tomorrow. If I give in tomorrow, then it’s going to become almost impossible to stop.
Eating outside – perhaps at a restaurant with other people – is a different mechanism. I have found that a dinner out today doesn’t create a craving for another dinner out tomorrow. The cycle doesn’t start. I can eat freely and then move on, and the next day the food is just food, plus I gained some (hopefully) fun memories of my dinner.
This has always been true, and it’s still true today. The conditions haven’t changed — I live alone, I eat alone most evenings. How did I stop overeating? How am I, finally, taking charge of this battle? I made a small change inside of the situation, not to the situation itself.
The moment of this change was unremarkable, which is why I remember it.
A couple of months ago, about halfway through April 2026, I had come back from a nice, fun weekend away, the kind that gives you a sense of impending doom on Sunday evening. I ate badly that night — not unusual, I had done it many times in the same emotional context, the particular melancholy of a good thing ending.
When I finished, I sat there and asked myself something I hadn’t asked before: what did that give me? Was it worth it?
No anger, no self-criticism. Just a cold, almost scientific observation: this was useless. It didn’t make the weekend last longer, it didn’t make Monday feel better. It gave me nothing except the evidence that I had done it again. For the first time, though, after I had eaten improperly I didn’t feel guilt. For a very simple reason: I knew that was the last time.
I haven’t eaten badly alone at home since that evening. Not because I became a different person — the desire is still there, I recognize it when it arrives. But something about that question changed the relationship. The desire stopped being automatic. It became a choice, and choices can be declined.
When this happened, I weighed 72 kilograms (159 pounds). Now, at the time of writing this article, I weigh 68 (150). The vertical lines of the six pack are visible in good light. The iliac crest is showing. Shirts I wore comfortably for years are now enormous.
More than the numbers, though, what surprised me was discovering I had the strength for this. I had spent years convinced that 75 kilograms was a wall I couldn’t break through — a ceiling built into my biology, or my discipline, or some fundamental limitation of who I was.
It wasn’t. It was built out of evenings I don’t have anymore. The body changed when the evenings changed. That’s the whole equation, as far as I can tell. I just needed a decision, made once and kept, that the empty evenings were costing more than I was willing to pay.