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Consider, for example, the amount of water in your body. It may feel like it’s under your conscious control and indeed you can choose to have or delay a drink, but over the course of your life the amount of water in your body, and thus the concentration of the hundreds of thousands of dissolved chemicals that make you up, is precisely controlled internally, even as you drink, sweat and pee. The conscious control of fluid balance is temporary at best and largely an illusion. And the case of breathing is more obvious still if you try to stop doing it. Food intake is under little more conscious control than breathing or drinking, and this is why it is nearly as hard to limit food intake as it is to limit water or oxygen intake. What, when and how we eat is determined by complex systems that operate far below our conscious level.

Explanation and Analysis:

In this quote, van Tulleken looks at the popular idea that people can control how much they eat by regulating it with conscious choices. He argues that while this idea is widely held, it is in fact misleading. In order to help people unlearn th...

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Original

Romeo

(aside) She speaks.
O, speak again, bright angel! For thou art
As glorious to this night, being o’er my head,
As is a winged messenger of heaven
Unto the white, upturnèd, wondering eyes
Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him
When he bestrides the lazy-puffing clouds
And sails upon the bosom of the air.

Juliet

O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art though Romeo?
Deny they father and refuse they name.
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet.

Modern

Romeo

(to himself) She speaks. Speak again, bright angel! For tonight you are as glorious, there up above me, as a winged messenger of heaven who makes mortals fall onto their backs to gaze up with awestruck eyes as he strides across the lazy clouds and sails through the air.

Juliet

O Romeo, Romeo! Why must you be Romeo? Deny your father and give up your name. Or, if you won’t change your name, just swear your love to me and I’ll give up being a Capulet.

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