True satisfaction is about fulfilling a desire, but also enjoying it. After all, being satisfied is not the same thing as being stuffed. In fact, it’s often the opposite. In my own dieting days, I routinely ate what I called a “mixing bowl salad” for dinner. By that I mean I made a salad so enormous that I had to eat it out of my largest mixing bowl. And when I say “salad” I mean a family-size bag of lettuce, doused in vinegar, and pretty much nothing else. At the end of this so-called meal, I would be full to bursting, but nowhere near satisfied. If I had eaten what I wanted — be it a piece of chicken or a slice of pizza — I would have eaten a lot less food. I would have been comfortable and sated, able to do something with my evening besides sit there and wait for my belly full of roughage to digest. But back then, I never would have considered it. It never would have occurred to me to ask myself what I wanted. Sitting there on my bedroom floor (where I ate most of my meals), I felt like someone had just filled me up with styrofoam. I could barely hear the crying of my own appetite, buried underneath all that stuffing. And that was the point.