Nobody gained weight. Their cravings changed anyway.

Today’s letter

The one slot a day that can change what you crave

In 1969 a young psychologist named Howard Moskowitz finished his doctorate at Harvard. His first big job was for the US military, which had a problem with its field rations: soldiers were opening the meals, eating part of them, and throwing the rest away. Those calories were supposed to go inside the men, so the Army asked him to work out why the food kept getting abandoned.

What he found was that big, distinct flavors tire the brain out. Eat something strongly flavored and the wanting drops off fast, so the soldier stops. Keep the flavor from ever landing as one clear taste, and the eating goes on and on. The Army wanted that answer so its men would finish their rations. Companies that hired him afterward wanted the same answer, for a different reason.

“Why can’t I ever stop at one?”

You are not a person who gives up on things. Most of your life is proof of that: the kids raised, the job held, the parent you sat with at the end. Nobody who knows you would call you weak. And yet there is one box in the cupboard that has beaten you more times than you can count.

You did what the advice said. Buy the smaller bag, keep it out of the house, wait fifteen minutes and the wanting passes. This year everyone has a name for it, food noise, and half of what you read makes it sound like a fault in your own head. When it did not pass, you decided the problem was you… Not the food, and not the fifty years of research that went into the food. You.

Here’s what gets me.

None of it was your fault. Not one bag of it.

Hormones, genetics, stress, aging…

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Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study that handed forty-nine ordinary people a snack and then watched what happened to what they wanted.

Researchers in Germany, Switzerland and the United States ran it for eight weeks. Everyone in the study kept eating their normal diet, and on top of that each person got a small pudding to eat twice a day. Which pudding you got was decided by chance, like a coin toss.

Half the group got a pudding high in fat and sugar. The rest got one with the same calories and much less of both. Nobody was told to lose weight, cut anything out, or change one other thing about how they ate. All of them were a normal weight at the start, and thirty-two of the forty-nine were women.

What they found

Yale and the Max Planck Institute, 2023. Thanarajah et al., Cell Metabolism.

The high fat, high sugar pudding (they wanted more)

After eight weeks, these twenty-six people wanted the low fat option less than they had at the start, and their brains answered more strongly to food. Nobody had asked them to change anything else.

The low fat, low sugar pudding (they stayed the same)

Twenty-three people ate the same calories on the same schedule for the same eight weeks. What they wanted at the end was about what they wanted at the start.

Body weight and blood markers came out no different between the two groups. The change showed up in what they wanted, not on the scale.

In other words, two small puddings a day for eight weeks was enough to change what those people liked, while their bodies stayed exactly where they were.

Their willpower had nothing to do with it. Yours doesn’t either.

So how does a pudding get a vote in what you want?

Your brain keeps a running score of which foods pay off, and it updates that score every single time you eat. Fat and sugar arriving together in one mouthful is a combination almost nothing in nature offers, so the score comes back enormous, and the plainer food gets marked down in the same stroke. That is what the scans picked up: more response to the food, less wanting for the low fat option. Meanwhile the flavor engineering that came out of those ration labs makes sure the stop signal never arrives, because no single taste is ever strong enough to tire you out.

Those volunteers never stood a chance. Neither did you, I’d bet.

That’s the part no one says out loud… the wanting was built on purpose, by people who were paid well to build it.

Try this today

Pick the one time of day the wanting hits you hardest. For a lot of women it lands between three and five in the afternoon, or in the first hour after dinner. Now choose one whole food you already like and can eat without cooking: a handful of almonds, an apple with peanut butter, a boiled egg, plain yogurt with berries. Eat that same food, in that same slot, every day for the next two weeks. Same food, same hour, no swapping it around. You are banning nothing here, and if you still want the other thing afterward, go ahead and have it.

Repetition is what taught your brain to want the pudding. It is also the one lever that works in the other direction.

Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick.

I’m in. I’ll try it today →

This is not magic, and two weeks of almonds will not undo fifty years of food science. What it does is put a little of that same learning on your side of the table, using the one mechanism the study actually found: the same food, in the same slot, over and over.

Moskowitz answered the Army’s question more than fifty years ago, and every company that hired him afterward has had all that time to use the answer on you. You have had it since this morning.

There’s still time for you.

So the next time the bag wins, think about what it took to build that bag…

It was never your fault.

— Cole

P.S. What hour of the day does the wanting hit you hardest? Just the number. Hit reply and send me 3, or 9, or whatever yours is, and tomorrow I’ll tell you which hour comes up most.

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