Areas › Your body › Food, caffeine and fuel
Put a rubber band round your water bottle for each refill you want to get through today, and slide one off each time you finish it. Nothing to remember, nothing to buy, and you can see where you are at a glance.
Tracking anything in your head is hard when your head is already full, and harder still when concentration is one of the things that has taken a hit. Moving the tracking onto the bottle takes that job off you. Reset the bands in the morning. The small satisfaction of sliding one off is doing more work than it looks like.
Qur’an and Sunnah
It is He who sends down water for you from the sky, from which comes a drink for you (Quran 16:10). Water is named as something given to you, so drinking enough of it is worth a small bit of trouble.
هُوَ ٱلَّذِيٓ أَنزَلَ مِنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ مَآءࣰۖ لَّكُم مِّنۡهُ شَرَابࣱ وَمِنۡهُ شَجَرࣱ فِيهِ تُسِيمُونَ
It is He who sends down water for you from the sky, from which comes a drink for you, and the shrubs that you feed to your animals
Qur’an 16:10read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Structured self monitoring gets a bad name for making people miserable, and the pooled evidence does not really support that. A meta-analysis of adult behavioural weight management programmes found they did not worsen mental health and were associated with small improvements in depressive symptoms. Those were formal programmes rather than a rubber band, so treat it as reassurance about the general approach rather than a finding about this tool.
Jones RA, Lawlor ER, Birch JM, Patel MI, Werneck AO, Hoare E, Griffin SJ, van Sluijs EMF, Sharp SJ, Ahern AL. (2021). The impact of adult behavioural weight management interventions on mental health: A systematic review and meta-analysis.. Obesity reviews : an official journal of the International Association for the Study of Obesity doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A cue you can see and touch does the remembering for you, so following through stops depending on concentration.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Here is a question that costs nothing: has anyone in your family been told their vitamin D was low? It runs in families through genes, skin tone, where you live and how much time anyone spends outside.
Even where a herb has good evidence behind it, that evidence belongs to the plant and not to the bottle in your hand. Testing keeps turning up products that do not contain what the label says.
Where ADHD and disordered eating meet, the pattern is more often bingeing, or bingeing and purging, than strict restriction. Restriction tends to travel with over-control, while bingeing travels with impulse and reward seeking.