On April 10th, fresh off a family vacation in Miami and still spiritually sticky with airport pastrami sandwich guilt, I stepped on the scale and was greeted with a soul-curdling 247 pounds. Yes, some of it is lifelong muscle from half a century of hoisting kettlebells and playing Hercules in the garage. But make no mistake—this number was a slap in the face, a statistical insult to my dignity. Fueled by a righteous anger I can only describe as metabolic revenge, I went to war.
First, I cut my meals down to three per day and gamified the system like a psychological Jedi. My lunchtime yogurt-and-berries bowl got reassigned as a post-nap “treat,” and a humble apple—normally the most boring fruit in the bowl—was elevated to nightly “dessert,” strategically scheduled for 8 p.m. to give my inner child something to cling to as the kitchen closed. I also slashed my coffee intake from 36 to 18 ounces (don’t worry, I’m still barely human), and dropped my creatine from 6 grams to a mere 3—enough to retain my swole, but not enough to float like a sodium balloon.
Meanwhile, I came to grips with the ugly truth that I was overstuffing both my freezer and my face. The freezer had become a metaphor for my appetite: jammed with frozen berries, low-carb snacks, and delusions of future discipline. Constantly raiding it created two problems: overconsumption and literal water puddles from a clogged defrost drain. My wife and I emptied the thing out like detoxing hoarders, and miraculously, the fridge stopped weeping. I then purchased a chest freezer for the garage to create a buffer zone—a cold storage moat to protect the kitchen from my impulsive nibbling.
By April 19, I had dropped to 240 pounds—a loss of seven pounds in nine days, even with an Easter cheat day that involved chocolate cake and blueberry pie, which I regret nothing about. Today I weigh again after my workout, prepared to assess the pastry fallout. But here’s the real revelation from those ten days: the hunger I thought I was feeling wasn’t hunger—it was performance anxiety from my stomach, a neurotic need to react to every twitch of emptiness like it was a national emergency. That, my friends, is where Cravattenuation comes in.
Cravattenuation is the noble and necessary art of muting your inner snack gremlin—the one who panics at the first polite growl of your stomach and demands cheese. It’s the mental and metabolic recalibration that teaches you this: real hunger is not a 3 p.m. yawn with a craving for almonds. It’s a deeper emptiness, one you can actually enjoy. Because when you let your appetite stretch out and breathe, you arrive at meals not with guilt or compulsion, but with appetite and joy. Hunger becomes less of a trigger and more of a drumroll.
Cravattenuation the deliberate process of retraining your body to interpret minor hunger signals not as existential emergencies but as low-priority system notifications: “You might want to eat in a bit” instead of “RAID THE PANTRY OR DIE.” Just as meditation teaches you to sit with discomfort rather than react impulsively, Cravattenuation teaches you that a little hunger isn’t a crisis—it’s foreplay for a better meal.
We’ve been conditioned by snack culture and anxiety-driven consumption to treat hunger as something to be feared and fixed immediately, like a smoke alarm or a toddler tantrum. But when you practice Cravattenuation, something remarkable happens: your threshold for hunger strengthens, and the urgency softens. You learn to sit with a mild stomach pang without spiraling into carb-lust. Over time, you develop what can only be described as Hunger Discernment: the ability to separate emotional nibble-itching from true physiological need.
The Unexpected Perk:
By making your body earn the meal—not through punishment, but patience—you begin to eat with a clarity and joy that’s been missing since the dawn of office vending machines. Food tastes better when you’re actually hungry for it. Not “kinda bored” hungry, not “scrolling through cheese reels” hungry, but real hungry. Cravattenuation helps you not only manage your weight with more ease and grace, it re-enchants the eating experience itself. You’ll start treating meals like mini homecomings rather than pit stops at a dopamine gas station.
Name for the Healthy State: Savorosity
(savor + satiety + curiosity)
Savorosity is the elegant state you enter after mastering Cravattenuation—a zone where hunger feels less like a hostage crisis and more like an invitation. It’s when you greet mealtime with curiosity and pleasure, not guilt or compulsion. It’s when you chew slower, taste deeper, and know you’ve arrived not because you gave in to a craving, but because you earned your appetite.
Cravattenuation gets you there. Savorosity keeps you there. And together, they free you from the tyranny of the pantry’s siren call.
Of course, the desired state of Savorosity has an opposite condition: Munchdrift, which is the mindless, momentum-driven eating that results from random grazing, emotional nibbling, and culinary boredom. It’s what happens when hunger is no longer a signal but a background noise, muffled by routine snacking and phantom cravings. In the Munchdrift state, meals are neither anticipated nor savored—they’re accidental. A handful of nuts here, a swipe of hummus there, three spoonfuls of cottage cheese at midnight, and suddenly, you’ve eaten 1,200 calories without ever feeling either full or satisfied. The food doesn’t taste bad; it just doesn’t taste like anything—because your palate is bored and your appetite never had a chance to sharpen.
While Savorosity is marked by intentionality, restraint, and presence, Munchdrift is all drift and no anchor. It’s eating as ambient noise. It’s the cognitive equivalent of scrolling Instagram while watching TV while wondering why you’re still chewing.
Cinemorphosis 
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