From the SLD forums:
I just had a great victory. My daughter is having her friends over so we are making friendship cookies. . . . I was feeling miserable for the first time since starting SLD [Shangri-La Diet] like I wanted to eat a whole bunch of them and totally binge out. I ate a few crumbs that fell off and couldn’t get them out of my mind (I haven’t had this problem in 6 wks.). I went ahead and decided to eat just one of the yummy delights. . . . After one I was so very full I actually didn’t want anymore! DO YOU REALIZE WHAT THIS MEANS? I mean, wow! I can actually have just one cookie. I never ever ever have been able to do that before.
I like to think the Internet is improving my writing by showing me many examples of how to do it. This quote is half of a well-written few paragraphs. The other half would be the general rule that Michel Cabanac discovered: If your set point is lower than usual you will feel full sooner than usual, as this quote illustrates. (The Shangri-La Diet had lowered her set point.) Interesting idea + emotion-charged example = good writing. Blogs are another example. As I’ve said before, they are full of good writing. You don’t blog about stuff you don’t care about.
Books — part of the great wide non-Internet — suffer by comparison. I recently started reading a book about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. I was favorably disposed: Chez Panisse is a great achievement, I am very interested in food and changes in food, it took place near my house, I had attended a nice reading given by the author. In spite of all this, I stopped after a few chapters. The book is very well written in a nuts-and-bolts way. However, it lacks emotion — the author didn’t care passionately about his subject and it shows. The book had come about because Alice Waters’s assistant had approached him and asked him if he was interested in doing such a book. He took a long time, he did a careful and thorough job, but no amount of time or care or editing could fix the problem that he didn’t feel strongly enough.