Delayed Thermostat

A hypothesis that a balancing response arrives late enough to create overshoot and oscillation.

You eat fast, feel nothing, keep eating, and then 20 minutes later the fullness arrives all at once and you feel awful. Every buffet ends the same way. Your body has a perfectly good stop signal; it just reports on the situation as it stood two servings ago.

Delayed Thermostat is the hypothesis that a balancing response arrives late enough to create overshoot and oscillation: the correction works, but its lag means you sail past the target before it kicks in, then often swing back the other way, skipping meals after overeating. Test it by prediction. If the delay is the culprit, then slowing the input rate, eating at half speed, should reduce overshoot even with zero change in willpower, because the signal gets time to catch up with reality. The strongest rival: the signal itself is broken or being overridden by something else, stress or habit, in which case slowing down changes little. The distinguishing observation is two weeks of deliberately slow meals with a simple fullness rating afterward. If confirmed, interventions target the lag: pause mid-meal, smaller servings with forced waits, pre-portioning. What changes is that you stop blaming discipline for what is a timing problem. Do not force the archetype onto swings driven by external shocks; a lag you cannot find is a lag that may not exist.