Notice your week before you change anything.

You can't change a pattern you've never actually seen

Ask anyone to describe their own week and they'll describe their intentions. Ask them to photograph it for seven days and they get a different week back — one with four desk lunches in it, a Thursday tea at nine o'clock, and two mornings where breakfast was a coffee and a promise.

That gap is normal and it isn't a character flaw. Memory keeps the meals you decided on and quietly drops the ones that just happened — and the ones that just happened are most of the week.

The whole method: photograph the plate

For seven days, take a photograph of what you're eating, before you eat it. That is the entire job. No weighing, no counting, no app that wants your macros, no writing anything down. A photo carries the time with it, so you get the when for free — and the when turns out to matter as much as the what.

Two rules, and they're the only two:

• Photograph everything, including the bits you'd rather not. The takeaway, the second helping, the four biscuits at eleven. A record you've tidied up tells you about your standards, not about your week.
• Change nothing this week. Not one thing. If you start improving while you're recording, you'll end up with a beautiful week of a life you don't actually live.

What tends to be sitting there

I'll use mine, because it's the one I'm allowed to tell you about. When I finally did this properly, the food wasn't the surprise. The shape of the day was. I ate late, I ate fast, and I sat straight back down afterwards, every single evening — and I'd have told you beforehand that my evenings were fine.

The sort of thing a week of photographs makes visible:

• Where you eat. Four lunches in front of a screen, back on the keyboard inside ten minutes.
• When you eat. The gap between the last thing at night and going to bed — and how much shorter it gets on shift days.
• How long it takes. Some meals are twenty minutes. Some are four, standing up, with your coat still on.
• What happens next. The hour after your evening meal is the most repeatable hour in most people's day, and almost nobody can tell you what they do with it without looking.
• The difference between a Tuesday and a Saturday. Plenty of people are eating two entirely different weeks and think they're eating one.

What this is not

It isn't a test and it doesn't measure anything. There's no score at the end, nothing to submit and nothing to pass. It also can't tell you anything clinical — a photograph of a plate is not a reading of any kind, and if you have questions about your health or about a result, they belong with your GP. This is a record of a week, made by you, for you.

At the end of the seven days

Read it once, in one sitting, as though it belonged to somebody else. Then pick exactly one pattern — not the worst one, the most changeable one — and change a single ordinary thing about it. That's the next page: one ordinary thing at a time.

And keep photographing afterwards if you can. The record is worth more in week nine than in week one, because by then you can see whether the change you made is still there.

Common questions

Do I need any kit?
A phone. That's it. No scales, no app, no subscription, nothing to buy.

What if I forget half the time?
Photograph what's left. Half a record beats a tidy blank, and the meals you forget to photograph are usually the interesting ones.

Can you look at my photos and tell me what they mean?
I can tell you what I notice about the shape of your week — when you eat, where, how quickly, what's around it. That's what the six-month coaching is: you photograph, I read it and write back. What I can't do, ever, is tell you anything about your health, your test results or your medication. I won't even guess. That's your GP's, every time.