I just had a patient telling me how when it came to working out what next to do in her life to make it more fulfilling, ‘What to eat next?’ Was a much simpler question! She realised as we delved deeper, that the much bigger question of: ‘What am I here in this life to do?’ was too overwhelming. Like most people, she found this question too confronting, and wanted to be rid of it for a much simpler, easier question. What to eat next? also takes us to immediate gratification of our needs – hence its power.

From this you can see why I say that my next book The Way of The Quest (out in Australia very soon) is the sequel to Food Lovers. For people where food is the most important and meaningful part of their day, we need to wheel out the big guns to take food on. Finding what is meaningful for us, and pursuing the purpose informed by this meaning, is one of the few forces that can compete with the enormous power of food. We can’t take food away from people, in the hope of losing weight, when it ranks so highly in their life, unless we bring in the bigger power of finding our meaning and purpose in this existence.

At the risk of over-stretching the metaphor – the trick is to break the otherwise overwhelming task of finding our meaning and purpose down into bite-size chunks. In this way we can compete with the much easier question of ‘What to eat next.” More on how to do this later.