I read and listen to an awful lot of words. How many? Let’s see. I must get through at least four hours of speech radio, podcasts and audiobooks a day. At roughly three words a second that’s more than 10,000 an hour, so let’s call it 40,000 a day. And I must be in conversation for about the same amount of time, so allowing for silences and subtracting the words I use, that’s maybe another 15,000 a day. And I must read about the same number. I reckon, all up, 70,000 a day; 25m a year. Some of those words have more merit than others. A few, vanishingly few, are sheer gold. One short sentence can reframe everything.
An example: I’ve banged on extensively about my propensity to overeat, at every meal, and between meals, all day, every day. After more than half a century of this, the shame of it hadn’t abated any more than the habit. I’d all but given up trying to change. Then a month ago, I picked up Paul McKenna’s book I Can Make You Thin. This turned out to be something of a gamechanger. I have not overeaten since and I’m 6kg lighter. The whole book is interesting, and I have even quite enjoyed the “weight-loss mind-programming audio”.
But it’s just one sentence that has done the trick. It’s a simple enough sentence expressing a simple enough idea: the importance of eating very slowly. “In this way, you make every bite a conscious choice, eating your food like a gourmet and savouring every mouthful instead of shovelling it in on automatic like a barnyard animal.” That’s it. I think it’s the comic image of the barnyard animal that nails it. I am no longer a barnyard animal. I love the word so much that I am using it as a verb. And I’m pretty confident that I’ve stopped barnyarding for life.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
