Last night, after the session, I came home to an empty kitchen.

My wife is away on a work trip. She usually cooks, and on dialysis days I usually come home to food that already exists. Cooking for myself after a session is a problem I've never really solved — I'm too tired, or there's no time, or I'd rather spend that hour working. So I stood there, looked at nothing, and went back down to the shop next to my building, the one that stays open until midnight and stocks almost nothing.

Here's the basket: a Mars, a Snickers, a bag of salted sunflower seeds — which I hadn't touched in about a hundred years, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone reading this blog — and a sweet roll that is essentially sugar arranged in the shape of bread.

That was dinner. Mostly the seeds.

This morning there was still nothing in the flat, so I had breakfast at McDonald's.

It's Saturday. The next session is Monday. I've written before about what the long gap does to a weekend — and I've just opened this one with a bag of salt. I know exactly what the next two days look like: the thirst, and a craving for sweet things that will be roughly twice its normal size. Whether I hold the line, I genuinely don't know. I'm writing this from inside it.

It never starts with a decision

There is no moment where I sit down and announce: right, I'm done being careful about food now.

It starts with one snack I normally wouldn't buy. A small negotiated exception, agreed with myself in about two seconds, with a reason attached. Then a second one a few days later, and the second one is easier, because the first already happened and nothing visible went wrong. Then three. Then it isn't an exception anymore, it's just what I eat now — and I haven't noticed that anything changed, because nothing changed on any particular day.

Every step has a reason. Last night's had an excellent one: empty fridge, no strength, a shop with three edible shelves. That's what makes it invisible. A series of small reasonable evenings, and then a basket.

The boat

My food discipline floats on willpower, and willpower is not a fixed quantity. It's limited by my physical state, and my physical state is not something I fully control.

So the boat always ends up leaking. Not sometimes — always, eventually. What varies is where the water comes in.

A session that went badly, after which there's nothing left in me for careful cooking. Something salty, and the thirst that follows it around all evening. A table at someone's house, where at some point I stop being the person with a list and just join in — eat what everyone eats, drink what's on the table. A stressful week at work.

And, apparently, a wife on a business trip. Because what last night actually exposed is that the thing holding my diet up wasn't willpower at all. It was routine — hers, as it turns out, as much as mine. Knock out the routine for a day or two, and willpower is suddenly the only thing on duty. Willpower after a dialysis session is not a guard I'd hire.

The first snack almost always arrives through one of those doors.

Why the drift costs more here

For most people a few sloppy weeks are a few sloppy weeks.

I'm not going to describe what it does in anyone else's body — that's between you and your team, and the numbers I work against came from mine. I'll only say the obvious mechanical part: the things I'm asked to keep an eye on don't file themselves under later. Fluid, and the minerals I've written about here before, and a schedule that doesn't move just because my week got messy.

So one chocolate bar is not the interesting part. The interesting part is the moment I stop noticing that chocolate bars have become normal.

The only thing that has actually improved

I want to be honest about what did and didn't change, because the honest version is less impressive and more useful.

The falling didn't stop. Last night is the proof, in seed form.

What changed is the delay. It used to run a couple of months. Sometimes longer. There were stretches — I'll say it plainly, because I think people in this situation say it to themselves and not out loud — where I went years without really watching my food at all.

Now I usually catch it in the first or second week.

The behaviour hasn't disappeared. My ability to detect it has improved. That's the entire result, measured over a long time.

What catching it looks like

Nothing sophisticated. At some point there's an uncomfortable moment of recognition — wait, what am I actually doing right now — and I hold that next to what I want to still be able to do in five years. Some days the two connect and something clicks back into place. Some days I see the gap perfectly clearly and buy the chocolate anyway.

When it does click, I go home and throw out the snacks I've been quietly accumulating. All of them. Throwing away food is stupid, I know it's stupid, and I've decided I'm fine looking stupid about this particular thing.

Other times I don't throw anything away — I just stop treating those foods as the default. Then I cook a normal meal. Then another one. No dramatic Monday restart, no punishment, no promise of perfection. The routine comes back the same way it left: quietly.

I don't have a method

I'd like to end this with a system. I don't have one.

I don't know what shortened the delay from months to weeks. Purely subjectively, it feels like the mechanism is recognition, not willpower — I'm not resisting better, I'm noticing sooner. Whether two weeks is as good as it gets, I have no idea.

Maybe one day I'll catch it while I'm still standing in the shop, holding the first Snickers. Last night I was holding four things. So: not yet.

Where the app sits in this

renalee has never once talked me out of a Mars bar, and it isn't built to.

What I want from it is that the leak has somewhere to be visible other than my memory — and my memory rounds everything down. The targets aren't its to set; your dietitian or nephrologist sets those from your labs, your stage and your schedule, and you put them in. It photographs the plate and estimates where the meal lands against them. Estimates — portions vary, kitchens vary, databases are averages. If you want exact, that's a blood draw.

I'm a patient, not a clinician. Everything above is my own kitchen, last night's basket included. What any of it means for you is a conversation with your team.

Monday's scale will tell me how the weekend went.

The Boat Always Leaks