The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

but in fact I ate a ton of fake food: pretzels, low-fat cookies or brownies, weird candy in bite-sized portions, and other not-very-healthy snacks. “Food that comes in crinkly packages from corner delis,” as one friend described my weakness. I liked eating fake food, because when I got hungry during the day, it was more convenient to grab something fake than to sit down to eat proper food like soup or salad. Plus, fake food was a treat. I’d never buy a real chocolate chip cookie or a candy bar, but I couldn’t resist the supposedly low-cal version.
    Even though I knew that this kind of food was low in nutrition andhigh in calories, I kept eating it, and this habit was a daily source of guilt and self-reproach. Each time I thought about buying some fake food, I told myself that I shouldn’t—but then I did anyway. I’d tried and failed to give up fake food in the past, but the food diary, incomplete as it was, made me aware of how much fake food I was eating.
    I gave up fake food cold turkey—and it felt good to give it up. I’d thought of these snacks as treats and hadn’t realized how much “feeling bad” they’d generated—feelings of guilt, self-neglect, and even embarrassment. Now those feelings were gone. Just as I’d seen in July, when I was thinking about money, keeping a resolution to “Give something up” can be surprisingly satisfying. Who would have thought that self-denial could be so agreeable?
    I told my sister what I’d done, and she answered, very sensibly, “You basically eat a very healthy diet, so why give up fake food altogether? Limit yourself to a few treats each week.”
    “Nope, can’t do it!” I told her. “I know myself too well to try that.” When it comes to fake food, I’m like Samuel Johnson, who remarked, “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.” In other words, I can give something up altogether, but I can’t indulge occasionally.
    It’s true, I have a very particular definition of “fake food.” I still drink a huge amount of Diet Coke and Fresca; I still use a ton of artificial sweetener. I also eat a fair amount of candy, which I consider real and not fake. But no more crinkly packages from corner delis, and that’s a real step forward. Bananas, almonds, oatmeal, tuna sandwiches, and salsa on pita bread are filling the gap.
    My fake-food experience showed me why mindfulness helps you break bad habits. When I became truly aware of what I was eating, I found it much easier to change the automatic choices I’d been making. Two or three times a day, I’d mindlessly been picking up snacks in corner delis—but when I was confronted with what I was doing, I wanted to stop. And it was only after I’d kicked my fake-food habit that I realized what a drain it had been on my happiness. Every day I’dfelt uncomfortable twinges of self-reproach, because I knew that kind of food wasn’t healthy. Once I stopped that habit, that relentless source of bad feeling vanished.
     
    The mindfulness resolutions for October had been interesting and productive and had boosted my happiness considerably, but more important, my increased awareness had led me to an unrelated yet significant realization: I was at risk of turning into a happiness bully.
    I’d become much more sensitive to people being negative, indulging in knee-jerk pessimism, or not having—what seemed to me—the right spirit of cheerfulness and gratitude, and I felt a strong impulse to lecture, which I didn’t always manage to resist. Instead of following June’s resolution to “Cut people slack,” I was becoming more judgmental.
    My desire to be a happiness evangelist made me want to meddle. When a guy told me that he hated making small talk and so whiled away the dull hours of a dinner party by doing complex math problems in his head, or when a young woman told me she was going to dental school because she liked the hours that dentists work but that her fantasy was one day to do something involving flowers because flowers were her true passion, I could barely contain myself. “No!” I wanted to tell them. “You’re making a mistake, I’ll tell you why!” I’d become a happiness boor. In a scene right out of a Woody Allen movie, I practically got into a fistfight with someone about the nature of Zen. “You seem quite attached to the theory of nonattachment!” I said snidely. I kept interrupting, I wouldn’t shut up, I was such a crusader for the idea of doing a