Using GL to sort the good, the bad and the suicidal 137 hard to work out what goes wrong here – this is vanilla flavored Restraint Theory in action. But then as I looked at it from the mindfulness perspective, I realized that for many people, breakfast and lunch, particularly during a busy week at least, are often not meals at which people enjoy the ritual, or are mindful of what they are eating anyway. Often people skip breakfast and eat lunch on the run. To keep their speed up, they buy fast food. By and large, fast food is not healthy food. MRs give us a different kind of ritual – they keep us in the ritual of eating at meal times, of not skipping meals. Typically, my clients do not have too much difficulty having a larger, healthier breakfast because multigrain toast and fibre rich cereals are not hard to buy and prepare. But for lunch they were either buying unhealthy food because it was cheap and fast, or eating rabbit food that left them hungry as they approached that danger time from afternoon tea time through the evening meal, to supper. It is for the‘ lunch on the run’ and that afternoon tea danger times that I see the real value of a meal replacement( MR). If you are someone, like me, for whom eating lunch at the office is a distraction from returning calls and getting tasks done that cannot be done during the rest of the day, then an MR is for you. While I often will have an MR for lunch on a work day, I would not have them for the evening meal or for lunch on weekends and holidays – which is our main meal of the day. Why? Because I look forward too much to the chewing, tasting, talking experience that is what a meal means to me. If giving up these things is not a big sacrifice for you then, by all means, have an MR more often. For people who are able to follow the French and make lunch the main meal of the day, and who can take the time to savour it, then have an MR instead of a light evening meal. This is actually, the best meal to replace with an MR as we are usually lining up to follow it with 10 hours of TV viewing and sleeping – neither of which burns many calories. In fact, research shows people burn off more calories sleeping than they do watching TV – so falling asleep in front of the TV is the clever move!