Toast as an appetite alarm clock

A small discovery from this week that I want to write down before it stops feeling like news: on mornings when food holds no interest at all, I put two slices of bread in the toaster anyway. Not because I want toast. Because in about ninety seconds the kitchen will smell like toast, and that smell argues better than I do.

There's a gap between the smell arriving and any decision being made, and that gap is where my appetite shows up. By the time the slices pop I usually want them, which still surprises me. Wanting food was the step I thought I had no control over. It turns out I can't decide my way into hunger, but I can apparently bait it.

Other smells that work

• Onions softening in butter102 kcal — even if I haven't decided what they're for yet.
• Coffee, oddly, even though it's supposed to blunt appetite. For me it signals breakfast.
• Cinnamon6 kcal warming in a dry pan when I'm nudging myself toward oats150 kcal.

I've stopped being embarrassed by how mechanical this is. My body responds to cues, so I've started laying the cues out on purpose, the way you'd leave your running shoes by the door. The toaster is just the most reliable one I've found: cheap bait, ninety seconds, works most mornings.

I tested the limits a little, because that's apparently who I am now. Frozen bread works as well as fresh. Setting the dial darker buys a stronger smell, at the cost of slightly bitter toast — worth it on the flattest mornings. Standing in the kitchen while it toasts beats wandering off, because part of the trick seems to be letting the smell catch me at close range, before the rest of the morning lodges its objections.

And on the mornings it doesn't work, I butter the toast generously and eat it anyway, slowly, at the table. Half a persuaded breakfast still beats the empty kind.