I’ve found it’s easier if I pretend chicken breast is something other than food. The reason this lightly damp, off-white material looks and tastes the way it does is that it’s a kind of foam insulation. It’s made of wood pulp. It’s made of ethylene-vinyl acetate. It’s made of recycled mattresses. They spray it out of a nozzle. Whatever it is, I need to pack as much of this insulating gunk into my body as possible, for medical reasons. The most efficient way to incorporate it is through the mouth. Which is why I stand in front of the fridge, picking lightly slimy sectors of cooked chicken breast out of a plastic tub and chewing on them until the tasteless wet foam disintegrates into a tasteless wet mulch, at which point I swallow. I could have it with a little dollop of sriracha if I wanted, make it taste of something, but in a way that would defeat the point. This stuff is not food. It’s not supposed to taste good. What it is is one hundred twenty-two calories and twenty-seven grams of protein per hundred grams.

Every day, I need to eat one hundred eighty grams of protein, while also not eating any more than eighteen hundred calories, and also not wanting to kill myself. This is possible. It can be done. It just involves a lot of mathematics. The problem is that in most cases, the more protein-intensive a food is, the more calorie-intensive it will be too. Cabbage doesn’t have much of either; beef and nuts and cheese have a lot of both. The correlation doesn’t go both ways, which means there are a lot of things that lurk under this trendline: that is, foods with loads of calories but not very much protein. That space contains essentially every dish from every world cuisine in all of human history. The number of edible objects that poke up above the line is very small. Since the terms I’ve set myself don’t leave me with much room for maneuver, I have to spend a lot of time eating whatever it is that offers me the most Pareto-optimal trade-off.

Some of these foods are normal. Chicken breast, tinned tuna, shellfish, lean pork. You can make a meal out of them. Through trial and error, I’ve developed a repertoire of high-protein, low-calorie travesties of the dishes I actually like. Asian food is best; if you throw enough spices and aromatics in you can almost pretend you don’t notice the wateriness, the glossy fatty quality that ought to be there but isn’t. I can make a very nearly acceptable version of a mapo tofu or a Keralan prawn curry or a pad kra pao. After a while you get used to obscenities like cauliflower rice. Of course, all these foods do come with some major drawbacks. If you eat too much tuna you will go mad and then die from mercury poisoning. All the seafood in the supermarkets is caught by chattel slaves, chained up and forced to work at gunpoint on Thai fishing boats, sometimes executed and thrown overboard. The things they do to battery chickens and gestation-crated pigs are so evil that when our civilization collapses we will absolutely deserve everything that happens to us. But worst of all, these ordinary dishes will never be enough. You always need more protein, and less of everything else. It is possible to eat one hundred eighty grams of the stuff a day, but it is not feasible to do so while only eating things that resemble meals. To make up the totals, you have to go elsewhere.

Which means that for months now, I’ve been inhabiting a weird hinterland of sinister nonfoods. Huge tubs of alchemical powder. Skyrs and kvargs, mysterious Boreal pastes from the frozen edges of civilization. Did you know that if you leave chia seeds in water overnight they’ll expand into an utterly vile jelly? Did you know that you can mix spirulina powder into fat-free yogurt for a revolting treat? Did you know that nutritional yeast not only looks but also very aggressively smells like the stuff they feed to goldfish? The ready-cooked strips of chicken breast live in this zone too. Eating has become a very distant memory. I incorporate quantities of matter. That’s all.

This has not been my usual approach to dinner. Every woman who’s ever dated me has eventually noticed that the one unambiguous upside to the whole arrangement is that you will end up sharing a lot of meals out with a kind of human waste disposal system called The Devourer. When you’re dining with The Devourer, it is impossible to order too much. I will eat my meal, I will eat your meal, I will eat absolutely everything left on the table, whether I really want to or not, and then, once it’s all gone, I will start picking crumbs off the tablecloth and mopping up sauce with my fingertips. I’ll gnaw at bones. I’ll gnaw at fish bones. If there are any olive pits left, I’ll scrape off the last microfragments of salty flesh with my teeth. It takes superhuman effort to keep myself from trying to eat the napkins.

It’s been like this as long as I can remember. I was an unusually long and skinny child with an intense appetite. At school, a usual lunch for The Devourer would consist of whatever was being slopped out, plus pasta with tomato sauce, a bowl of soup I’d heavily thickened with a good clammy fistful of cheddar cheese, a few big hunks of bread, two desserts, and a peanut butter sandwich. I would eat this, and then when I was done I would put away my tray, take up a new one, return to the counter, and have the exact same meal all over again. Usually there would just be two lunches, but three was not unheard of. A few hours later I would get home and set myself to the important task of eating bread. Bread smeared with cream cheese, bread smeared with jam, bread dipped in hummus. If I ran out of gloops for my bread I would sometimes have another bowl of breakfast cereal. I could usually ride this long afternoon graze all the way to dinner, where I would eat twice as much as either of my brothers and sometimes pick the odd morsel off their plates when they weren’t looking. After that I would eat more bread for dessert, once again smeared with anything in the kitchen more smearable than bread, then some dried fruit as a healthy snack, a large bowl of sugary strawberry-flavored yogurt as another healthy snack (I’d read somewhere that yogurt was slimming), and three to four apples in bed before I went to sleep. The next day, I would do it again. Every single day, for more or less a decade.

It’s a miracle I managed to avoid full-on obesity, but I did spend my teenage years growing increasingly wobbly around the midriff. I convinced myself that when I hit my inevitable growth spurt, the fat would magically redistribute itself into oblivion around my new, lankier frame. Instead, I just grew steadily along all three axes. It probably helped that I later ended up developing a few other compulsive habits: cigarettes, cocaine, and long-distance running. (Not all three at once, though.) But even with these, I’ve still spent my entire adult life cycling through occasional periods of looking vaguely doughy and unhealthy. What I’m doing now, ingesting tightly controlled portions of tasteless off-white material, is an attempt to break out of that cycle. But in a strange way, it’s not actually that unfamiliar.

I don’t particularly enjoy having chicken breast three times a day. But did I actually enjoy eating six desserts every afternoon? Sometimes, as I’m miserably polishing off the very last dregs of a meal, I’ll mention just how uncomfortably full I’ve become. It does actually hurt a bit, I’ll groan, to keep eating these dark misshapen shards of oily matter left from a pile of fries. I sort of wish that I didn’t have to shovel away this extra order of rice we weren’t sure we’d need. At this point, the person I’m eating with will usually say something ridiculous about how if I don’t want to eat this stuff, I could always just, you know, stop. Crazy, meaningless suggestion. The Devourer can’t just stop. I like food; I love food; I’ve traveled across continents to chase interesting meals; enjoying the food you eat is a wonderful thing. But it’s an added bonus. As nice as the sensory pleasure of food might be, it’s not essential; it’s not why I eat. The real reason is—what?

The traditional hamartiology of gluttony is strangely unhelpful here. Everyone seems to start from the position that gluttony is simply when you like food too much. According to Thomas Aquinas, who might have known, it is an “unseemly joy” and an “immoderate pleasure in eating and drinking.” Gluttony is when you eat for the pleasure of eating rather than as a sober duty to preserve your own life. The correct form of eating is given in Holy Communion, in which God comes to Earth and you eat Him with a total pious disregard for how He tastes. To relish anything else is not just sin but the form and model of all sin in the world. An attachment to the dark and sensuous earth, the body and all its temptations, rather than the bright clean pursuits of the intellect. The glutton is an animal, thoughtlessly pleasuremaxxing. Early Christians loved to point out that sin had come into the world through an act of eating. As one fifth-century abbot put it, “It was the desire of food that spawned disobedience; it was the pleasure of taste that drove us from Paradise. Luxury in food delights the gullet, but it breeds the worm of license that sleepeth not.” Gregory of Nyssa said that the sense of taste was “the mother of all vice.”

This definition seems incredibly broad and incredibly narrow at once. It’s entirely possible to be a glutton without any kind of overconsumption at all. You can be rail-thin, perfectly disciplined, no snacks; it won’t save you. One form of gluttony is seeking out new and exotic foods. If there’s a little Burmese place you’ve always wanted to try, if you’re excited when a new ethnic grocery opens near you, if you’ve ever wanted to eat something simply because you’ve never eaten it before, you have arguably committed the sin of gluttony. Another form of gluttony consists of eating foods that are dainty or complicated. Medieval moralists tend to have a particular focus on the type of person who insists on slathering their food in rich or flavorsome sauces. Some of them seemed to have viewed sauce with a kind of mortal terror. Something obscenely decadent about the possibility of a nonessential wet gloop to accompany your meal. Here’s Chaucer:

Of spicerie of leef, and bark, and roote,
Shal been his sauce ymaked by delit,
To make hym yet a newer appetit.
But, certes, he that haunteth swiche delices
Is deed, whil that he lyveth in tho vices.

In our more globalized era we have access to barks and roots Chaucer could never dream of. Flavorful sauces besiege us on all sides. If you have a jar of lao gan ma in your fridge, you may be engaged in levels of concupiscence the medieval world could barely imagine. A little bottle of salsa verde contains more unnecessary flavor than all the feasts at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It’s not really clear where the line is. Tomato ketchup? Mustard? Mayonnaise? Is a plain hot dog acceptable, or should you really just be eating the bun? Even that might not be enough. Say you’re the kind of person who truly enjoys plain, simple, humble food, unadorned, in modest quantities. You chomp away at your plain hot dog bun, savoring every bite of clammy virtuous stodge. Wonderful, you think. There is nothing that could improve this. You are a glutton. C. S. Lewis imagines an old woman who barely eats anything at all: “She is always turning from what has been offered her to say with a demure little sign and a smile ‘Oh please, please . . . all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp toast.’ You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less costly than what has been set before her, she never recognizes as gluttony her determination to get what she wants. . . . Her belly now dominates her whole life.”

Supposedly, the opposite of gluttony is fasting. In one of the many Hindu creation stories, the creator god Prajapati is formed out of the collective efforts of seven primordial rishis or sages, who derived their cosmic powers from incredible feats of fasting and austerity. There was fasting before there was even a universe in which the concept of food might possibly exist. Which does actually make a certain kind of sense: The physical, sensuous world is a late invention; before that there was just pure thought. Fasting is a little fragment of whatever it is we were up to before we ended up here. Pretty much every religious tradition on the planet endorses some version of this argument for fasting as a spiritual practice. According to the great Sufi mystic Ibn Arabi, fasting allows a mortal human being to experience some of the total self-sufficiency and freedom from want and need that is one of the fundamental qualities of God. The less you eat, the more you dissolve into the divine. Ibn Arabi called fasting the “white death,” a kind of symbolic death of the lower self that brightens and purifies the soul.

But actually, you can even be a glutton while fasting. In the long history of ritualized anorexia, there are a few people who definitely seem to have been getting some form of enjoyment out of the experience. Starving yourself is a fairly reliable way of bringing on ecstasies. Ida of Louvain was a thirteenth-century Cistercian nun who regularly swore off the pleasures of food, but described a miracle: whenever she recited from the Gospel of John—Verbum caro factum est—her mouth suddenly filled with honeycomb. (A sweet taste in the mouth can be a symptom of ketosis, when the body breaks down lipids into sugar after a period of starvation.) The Dutch mystic Lidwina fasted continuously from the age of fifteen. She was incapable of swallowing anything other than a few bites from an apple, some small pieces of bread dipped in water (preferably brackish river water from the estuary), and diluted wine. But she fed others: she kept buying extravagant foods and giving them to the poor. Fat loaves of white bread, huge shoulders of pork. Afterward, she would have ecstatic visions of heavenly feasts, in which all the food she’d given away was laid out for her on a rich banquet table and she could eat as much as she liked. Not everyone was so fond of this holy woman; some of her contemporaries thought she was possessed by a devil. You can kind of understand why. She might have been fasting for her entire life, but she was still managing to enjoy food. Which probably made her a glutton. But meanwhile I, wincing and wailing as I polish off an extraneous potato salad for no good reason—I’m in the clear, because even though I put away vast quantities of food, I’m not really enjoying myself. This seems unfair.

The modern world has come up with a few more likely explanations for my bizarre and debilitating eating disorder. Generally these try to avoid the language of sin and blame. Until quite recently, one of the most popular views was that some people are just like this, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all, and we absolutely shouldn’t be shamed for it. What’s more, the idea that we could decide to eat less if we wanted to is a harmful myth. There is no such thing as willpower. Dieting doesn’t work. If you absolutely have to account for why some people just happen to be like this, there’s a ready-made litany of pop-psychological explanations. Overeating is a trauma response; we do it to regain a sense of control over our own bodies after that autonomy was violated, with the potential violation being anything from a serious sexual assault all the way down to parents trying to control what we ate as children. We stuff our faces because we’re virtuous, long-suffering victims, and if you suggest we should maybe stop it, that’s just another re-victimization and it’ll only make us do it more. I’m sure this account does describe why some people eat, but not me. I do not gobble because I’ve been wounded. I am not vulnerable. It’s something else.

Scientists have their own explanations. Unlike pop psychology, which usually derives its conclusions by thinking about the sort of thing that it would be nice to believe, the biomedical sciences engage with reality by sadistically torturing small animals. This is not always more reliable. One promising area of study was the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus, a little nub of neurons buried near the base of the brain. Initially, it was discovered that if you use a laser to produce lesions on the ventromedial nucleus of a rat, the rat will suddenly develop an eating disorder. Lesioned rats never stop eating; they’ll gorge themselves until they’re monstrously obese, until they can no longer move around under their own power, until they’ve turned into little furry throw cushions with little ratty faces. Therefore, it was decided, the ventromedial nucleus is the part of the brain that tells you to stop eating when you’re full, and maybe in certain people it doesn’t work properly. Which was a nicely neat idea, but far too neat to be true. Early lasers weren’t quite accurate enough to reliably hit an area of a rat’s brain roughly half a millimeter across; the scientists had been obliterating whole regions of the hypothalamus, and achieving wildly different results each time. Another advance came thanks to the ob/ob mouse, a strain of mutant mice that emerged after a random mutation in a colony at the Jackson Laboratory in the 1940s. Like the lesioned rats, the ob/ob mice would keep eating ravenously until they were roughly spherical. Eventually it transpired that the ob/ob mice weren’t producing a hormone called leptin, which is usually produced by fatty tissue and sends a satiety signal to the brain. In normal circumstances, someone with a lot of fat will produce a lot of leptin, which means they’ll get full quicker and gradually return to a normal weight. Or so they thought. When researchers injected the mice with leptin, they all started eating less and slowly shrank down to ordinary proportions. The next step seemed obvious. The obesity epidemic was clearly just a hormone deficiency; all you had to do now was start giving leptin to overweight people. In 1999, this was tried. It did absolutely nothing.

The problem with all these approaches is that they assume a static object. Maybe it’s true that some people eat compulsively because of childhood trauma or because of problems with satiety hormones, but if you’ve been paying attention lately you might have noticed that there are a lot more people who can’t seem to stop themselves eating all the time than there used to be, and the number of people with this problem keeps rising every year. Maybe the reason all the great hamartiological traditions have basically nothing to say about my kind of gluttony is that for most of history, my kind of gluttony didn’t exist yet. It couldn’t; they didn’t have complex enough supply chains.

The most intuitive explanation is that there’s just a lot more food around. In the natural world, there is not very much of it; everything that exists does so on the point of starvation. The number of organisms in any ecosystem will always be just a little more than the food resources available can comfortably sustain. Every leaf has to struggle for its inch of sunlight. And for almost all of human history, pretty much everyone was in the same situation. Any improvements in the process of getting food out of the ground would be immediately swallowed up by an increase in the population. Any surpluses would be appropriated and squandered by some kind of rapacious ruling caste. For everyone else, death by hunger was always waiting. All it would take was one bad harvest, one lean season, one exciting new crop blight. Even in pockets of relative surplus and prosperity, you couldn’t expect much. The famous Roman grain dole allotted five modii of wheat a month to each adult male citizen, which works out at about eighteen hundred calories a day—the same amount I’m currently trying to starve myself on. If that adult male citizen lived alone, this could be the foundation of a decent enough diet. If he had a wife or children, it would very quickly diminish into uselessness. Still, supplying this grain to the plebs of a single city consumed maybe a tenth of the total state expenditure of the entire Roman Empire. This welfare program was eventually deified as a goddess called Annona, who appears holding an ear of wheat in one hand and a ship’s anchor in the other. There was something superhuman, divine, about the organizational capacity that could guarantee eighteen hundred calories a day in wheat.

The situation has changed a little over the last hundred years or so. Thanks to the Haber process, we can now generate limitless quantities of synthetic fertilizer out of thin air. It took ten hours to harvest an acre of wheat by hand; a combine harvester can do it in ten minutes. We have bulk carrier ships that can unload the surplus around the world at a cost so close to nothing that it makes no difference. The result is that there is an essentially infinite amount of food available, everywhere on the planet, with the only exceptions being places where hunger is actively used as a weapon of war. Some of the poorest countries in the world are in the grip of an obesity crisis. This has never happened before. The overriding problem has always been how to get as much food as possible; too much has never been a particularly live issue. We were not prepared for this century-long glut. If you live in a well-populated area in a developed country, you can effortlessly summon any food that exists, out of the ether and to your door, at any time, day or night. The sheer variety is enough to make people overeat; we tend to consume a lot more when there’s a range of different foods available. It probably doesn’t help that whatever you order, though, you’ll probably be getting the same thing, which is a big heap of ultra-refined grains, loaded with seams of pure sugar and drenched in industrial fats. But most of all, I think it’s the fact that my conscious mind is sharing this head with three billion years of hunger. It’s a constant fight to restrain the silent occupant that wants to turn me into an ob/ob mouse. It’s very, very easy to give in.

It’s not just food. Lately I’ve been doing the thing you’re not supposed to do and peering at strangers’ phones on public transport. The reason you’re not supposed to do this is that no one is ever doing anything remotely defensible on there. Usually it’s some kind of pointless flicking. A lot of people stare at short-form video apps, watching each short for about a second and a half and then scrolling down to the next, sometimes for hours at a time. Some people will flick up and down their camera roll, not actually looking at any of the pictures, or flick up and down in a messaging app, not actually reading any of the messages. Sometimes they’ll be playing some frighteningly stupid mobile game where you have to line up three red jelly beans, a sort of dangling colorful mobile for adults, interspersed every thirty seconds with ads for more frighteningly stupid mobile games. But mostly they just flick. I have seen ordinary, respectable-looking types spend an entire commute flicking through their home screen, all the different apps in neat formation, back and forth, doing absolutely nothing. I’m sure few of them are really enjoying this activity, but they can’t stop.

I know what these people are going through. There’s no food involved, but they’re being The Devourer; this is clearly just another kind of gluttony. For thousands of years, the only glowing screen we had to look at was the sky. The phone is better than that. They’re gorging themselves on stimulation. Almost everything in the world seems to encourage this kind of passive, helpless ingurgitation. The default way of watching T.V. is the binge-watch, in which you’re encouraged to sit basically motionless in front of the screen and inhale an entire twelve-hour narrative all at once. (Of course, a lot of people are no longer really capable of paying attention to the T.V. anymore; they can’t stop flicking pointlessly at their phones. This is why characters in Netflix shows have to keep loudly describing what they’re doing every five minutes.) Even books are the same. The most popular fiction is designed to be addictive, compulsive, huge tomes made up of tiny short chapters with a cliff-hanger at the end of each one, and they’re all in a seven-volume series so you can finish one and immediately start pigging out on the next. Most of all, there are the people who’ve abandoned every other aspect of their lives in favor of sitting in a dark room and masturbating for eight hours a day. They know that this is a miserable ersatz of what you can do with another person. But encountering another person seems almost impossible. Easier to just plug yourself in to the infinite stream of instantly available porn that all of us can access at a moment’s notice. Plug yourself in and just let it flow through you forever. Their sin isn’t lust; they don’t experience any lust at all. It’s gluttony.

You can understand why, until recently, a lot of people imagined that our future would be one of universal mindless consumption. But in fact, it might not be. There’s no chemical solution for pride or envy. But on the gluttony front, we might have found a cure.

The gila monster is a large, sluggish, stupid lizard that lives in a band of desert from northern Sonora to southern Nevada. It’s an opportunistic predator that will eat pretty much anything it can get its claws on. Eggs are its favorite, but it’ll happily eat a rabbit or a squirrel, or any bird it catches by surprise. Whatever it eats, it swallows whole, like a snake. The gila monster can easily consume half its body weight in food in a single sitting, but it only needs to eat five times a year. It’s not easy to hunt prey nearly as big as you are, but the gila monster has a couple of advantages. Firstly, its crushing bite, which can easily snap a small mammal’s neck. And secondly, its venom. Gila monster venom is a nasty mixture of enzymes and neurotoxins that systematically mess with various aspects of the endocrine system. Helothermine inhibits the ion channels, which can cause paralysis. Gila toxin disrupts the systems that regulate blood pressure. There’s also a chemical called exendin-4 that interferes with the dopamine system. When delivered as part of a gila monster bite, it causes sweating, swelling, nausea, and vomiting. You might also notice that you don’t have any particular interest in food, but that’s probably to be expected since you’ve just been bitten by a gila monster. But beginning in the late 1990s, researchers started to study it as a potential weight loss treatment. Unlike leptin, it worked.

Today, modified versions of the gila monster venom are sold as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and (on the gray market) Retatrutide. They’re one of the great pharmacological miracles of our age. It turns out that you don’t actually need to overcome your desires, exercise self-control, or use your faculty of reason to rise above the animal self. You can just inject yourself with synthetic lizard poison, and the compulsion to eat everything in sight will simply vanish. All these treatments do essentially the same thing, which is (among other things) to dampen dopamine signaling in the reward pathway. Everything still tastes exactly the same, but it comes without the little chemical spurt in the brain that is what we actually enjoy. People who use it describe incredible things happening in their lives. You go to the supermarket and load up on all your usual revolting snacks, and then a few days later you realize that you’ve forgotten to eat any of it. You go out to eat and the eating has become a chore, this tedious and repetitive process of putting foreign material in your mouth and swallowing it. Sometimes you’re vaguely aware that the body is hungry, the stomach keeps making gurgling sounds, it’s hard to concentrate on stuff, fuel is needed, but the experience of hunger isn’t there. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. Another body, which you can observe, but you are not trapped inside. You’re free.

And again, it’s not just food. Gila monster venom seems to take the compulsion out of any kind of compulsive behavior. There are early signs that it’s an effective treatment for alcoholism. Without the reward system lighting up, drinking is just an expensive way of feeling lightly nauseated. Why bother? Scientists are currently investigating whether it can treat gambling addictions, and it looks like it can. If you dose long-term heroin addicts with the stuff, they’ll spontaneously start sensibly tapering off their dose, and then once it’s down to zero they’ll put on a suit and tie and get a job. I’m certain that if you gave a good dose of Ozempic or Wegovy to the people I see on the Tube, they would suddenly gain the ability to put away their phones and sit peacefully with their own thoughts. Modernity has been the process of hacking our own limbic systems. We mastered the world, in more and more sophisticated ways, until we were utterly helpless before our dumbest most animal compulsions. Not anymore. We have finally developed a way of coping with a world that’s full of too much stuff.

I’m sure it would be easier for me if I were on the gila venom too. It would be easier to bear my eighteen hundred calories a day if I didn’t have The Devourer in here with me, its inarticulate jabbering: eat devour eat devour eat devour eat. Part of the reason I’m not doing this is ordinary narcissism. I want to believe that it’s possible for me to control my own actions, all by myself. It would be nice to know that I can do something other than slump into the nearest low-energy attractor. That I can choose not to follow my own worst instincts instead of just chemically deadening them. But if I’m honest, that’s not the real reason. The real reason is that everything I’ve heard about this stuff sounds strangely familiar. I’ve spent decades joylessly ingesting matter; now I’m joylessly ingesting matter in a slightly different way. What the gila monster venom seems to promise is yet more joyless ingestion of matter. The difference is that this time it’s not an occasional pathology that shows up around the end of meals or a brief corrective you have to suffer through before you can eat normally again. Once you’re on the jab you can’t ever stop, or you’ll put all the weight you lost right back on again. Every meal, for the rest of your life, will turn into pre-cooked chicken breast. This is what food is now. I can’t think of anything worse.

There is something that genuinely opposes our listless, helpless modern form of gluttony, though, and it’s gluttony. The old kind, the luxury of food that delights the gullet. The sin in which you actually enjoy your life. If we only did the things that brought us genuine pleasure, it’s hard to imagine that we’d be methodically consuming the same lunch three times over or staring at our phones for eight hours a day. It’s a strange world where mindlessly pleasure-seeking can feel like a difficult, even impossible task requiring vast reserves of willpower, but here we are. I hope, at least, that it’s possible. I know what’s been keeping me going through these weeks of chicken breast and chia seeds. One day this will be over. One day, in not too long, I’ll get to return to the world of real food. When it happens, I will not go back to eating on autopilot. I am going to eat something that is not even slightly protein-efficient, slathered in butter and smothered in rich and flavorsome sauces. My pleasure will not be moderate. My joy will not be seemly. I’m going to love it.