The issue with deliciousness is that once you get the taste for it, it’s hard to stop shoving things in your mouth (by ‘things’ I mean food things, stop thinking that other thing you were thinking). ‘I’ll only eat one Tim Tam’ turns into an empty packet. ‘I’ll just have a light dinner’ turns into the pain of trying to digest an entire dead animal. ‘I’ll just have a quick sandwich’ turns into a quick sandwich followed by an apple and some 2 minute noodles and a bigger sandwich and some chips and eating Nutella off anything else you could find. Generally a spoon. Or your finger.
This anti-will-power phenomenon is something I like to call ‘opening the food hole.’ It’s like opening the floodgates, except the gates are your mouth and the water is fried chicken.
For many years I excused my behaviour with the old standards ‘but think of the starving children in Africa!’ even though me having another piece of cake was never going to help a starving child in Africa, and ‘I better eat it before it expires’ when the expiry date was months away. I thought I was doing fine until late last year when I finally decided to do something about the couple of kilos I gained in Europe. I came up with a brilliant idea: I was only going to eat when I was hungry.
This plan lasted longer than I expected. I dropped two dress sizes. I had to buy a lot of new clothes. I can walk up stairs now. Well, some stairs. More stairs than before. Stairs are hard. But recently, I started to slip. I allowed donuts back into my life, and they brought their friends with them. Their cake-y, chip-y and deep fried-y friends.
I’m trying. I really am. My jeans still fit, but I’m constantly faced by the struggle of working around baked goods and having lunch once a week with that friend who never finishes her food.
It’s not my fault. I blame the deliciousness.
