I have a bad habit of snacking when I’m overly stressed or really backed up on deadlines, and I’ve kind of felt myself slipping back into that trap once again lately amidst everything else that I’ve been juggling creatively this summer. I don’t know what it is, but somehow when days become weeks late in meeting a deadline or even posting a column, somehow indulging in comfort foods that are actually horrible for me can help me to get things back on track … and unfortunately, knowing that it often times actually works does nothing but reinforce this bad behavior that helps in the short term, but then makes me feel lousy about falling off a completely different horse the next day!
My vice as of late, ironically enough, has been Pop-Tarts. Despite that column being more or less fictional when I originally wrote it last month, I’ve since made the mistake of embracing the very themes that I satirized therein because boy, have I eaten more Pop-Tarts than I’m proud to admit over the last couple of weeks! My all-time favorites are the chocolate ones that you see pictured there, although Brown Sugar Cinammon and Frosted Strawberry also made many an appearance on late nights … primarily because those two happen to be what my vending machine of choice posessed.
And it’s weird because it’s not even legitimate satisfaction – not only did I feel guilty already by the time that I was diving into the second one, but that whole thing about high-sugar diets just encouraging even more sugar is entirely true as well because it honestly wasn’t much long after that I caught myself wanting another snack, despite having just eaten 400 calories worth of Pop-Tarts in 5 minutes!
At least hopefully my solution to get around this should be fairly straight-forward – I need to get back to not carrying $1 bills in my wallet again because I’m just too easily tempted to sneak out to the vending machine for a quick fix … whatever I want to snack on throughout the day, whether it be pudding or granola bars or fruit, just needs to come with me when I leave the house because it’s pretty easy to regulate at that point if I start to feel like I’m loading up an entire grocery bag for a single day’s worth of food!
On top of all that, I also need to simply remember more self-restraint when I go to the grocery store so that I can avoid buying these sweet treats in bulk altogether. And honestly, that really should be easy enough, too – make a list in advance, stick to the list, don’t go shopping when I’m stressed and more likely to splurge.
I’m hoping I was able to derail this little bender before it did too much damage. I haven’t really touched a scale lately because I don’t feel like I’ve been doing much of anything to affect it in a positive manner, but I would argue that a little bit of the pants and shorts being too big effect that I was awkwardly proud of last month seems like it has disappeared just a bit, so it’s really time to get back in gear and start moving in the general direction towards Skinny Town once again!