Preloading on liquids (a glass of water, a cup of watery soup) is an old appetite-control trick. Preloading on smell is a little newer. Let’s have a sniff of what it’s all about… Taste is primarily smell since the “senses of taste and smell are yoked together phenomenologically” (Dennett, 1992, p. 46) and the smell of food accounts for a lion’s share of the food’s overall flavor.

Ever thought about how many precedents of change it takes to change a habit? Indeed, how many precedents did it take you to quit the last habit you quit and to develop the last habit you developed? Something to ponder, huh? Well, here’s a bit of somewhat arbitrary math of self-change for your to ponder…

Whether we eat or overeat, whether we eat when hungry or when mindlessly triggered, whether we eat mindfully or mindlessly, one thing is clear: we only eat what we like. In other words, we all eat for taste. Indeed, when we shop we buy only what we like and want to eat. Even the most health-conscious are guiding their food selections on the basis of taste. How something tastes is a hedonic consideration, i.e. a fundamentally emotional consideration. Thus, emotional eating is inevitable. So, we might as well learn to manage it (by making it mindful).

“Zero-sum” is when one’s needs cancel out another’s needs.  I learned the meaning of this violent doctrine as a Russian kid playing “nozhichki.”  Nozhichki (“little knives”) is a game of divide-and-conquer.  First, with the point of your pocketknife you draw a sizable circle on hard ground.  Then, you divide it in half – one side for you, the other side is for your playing opponent.  Then you take turns flinging the knife into your opponent’s turf: if the knife “stands” (i.e. if the blade jams into the ground), then, following the line of the blade, you carve out a piece of your enemy’s territory and add it to your own domain.  And you continue the onslaught like this until you win over the entire circle or your knife falls flat, in which case it’s your enemy’s turn.  Either my pocketknife needed a better blade or my throwing hand wasn’t good or the ground in the Arbat neighborhood of Moscow (just a block away from the Spaso-House, the residence of the U.S. ambassador to U.S.S.R.) was too hard, but the games would often find me on the losing side.

Hello, Eating Zoolanders

Matilda: “Did you find the files?”
Hansel: “I don’t even know what they loo–What do they look like?”
Matilda: “They’re in the computer.”
Hansel: “They’re in the computer?”
Matilda: “Yeah, they’re definitely in there. I don’t know how he labeled them.”
Hansel: “I got it.”
Matilda: “You gotta figure it out. We’re running out of time. You gotta find them and meet me at the show.”
Hansel: “Roger. In the computer. It’s so simple.”

Mind is a zoolander: a fashionable savage hypnotized by society to run random programs without self-awareness. Mind is a cliché-making machine starved for food of self-awareness. Who programmed you, eating zombie? Who’ll reprogram you, eating zoolander? The answer to the former question is lost in antiquity, the answer to latter question is reading this sentence. Guess who!