I’d rather not write about this. I’d rather just personally and privately acknowledge the binge and move on. But in the interest of keeping it real and not wanting anyone to continue believing I have some sort of ironclad willpower, here’s what happened.
I went to the supermarket today. The trip began with me on the way to the bread aisle passing an endcap full of Millena’s take-and-bake pizzas and salads and such. The last thing to catch my eye is a little square package containing nine nuggets of ready-to-bake chocolate chip cookie dough.
I keep on walking without even breaking stride, grab the loaf of light sourdough and move on through the market and the rest of the list. But there’s trouble: Shopping for everything else, I can’t shake that cookie dough from the front row of my conciousness. And sure enough once I have everything I make a beeline back across the store “just to have another look at the cookie dough.” Yeah, right. It goes into the cart without even the slightest hint of resistance.
Fast forward and I’m home. I’ve put everything away… except the cookie dough. It sits on the counter while I make a sandwich consisting of two slices of sourdough bread (110 calories), one garden burger patty (150 calories), a double dab of mustard (10 calories), some okra pickles (60 calories) and a diet Dr. Pepper (0 calories). I scarf that down while watching the last bit of The Color Purple on TV (I always bawl at the end when she’s reunited with her sister and meets her children for the first time).
I bring the cookie dough, still unopened, to my desk and input my lunch into my Fitday.com food log. All told, I’m at about 900 calories total for the day, which is excellent.
I consider just throwing the package in the trash, or better yet, flushing the contents down the garbage disposal, and I think what a blast it would be to do that and then proclaim my triumph here. But I don’t do that. Instead I open it. I remove one of the luscious looking raw doughy morsels. I put it back. I repeat the last two steps several times. Truth is: I don’t want the stuff. Never mind that I don’t need it, I really truly don’t want it.
But I eat one. Initially it doesn’t even taste good. In fact, it tastes down right bad. It’s got that stale freezer taste that’s just us unyummy as it gets, but then the chocolate chip flavor comes shining through and for a second you’d think I’d just shot up heroin. My eyes roll back in my head and I just savor the hell out of it.
Then another. And another. By the sixth one, every part of me is screaming ENOUGH! But since I’ve eaten this much I might as well eat the rest, right? So I gobble two more as if on auto pilot and then there’s one left, and now I really don’t want it. I’m feeling a little ill, the taste is gross… so here’s the perfect opportunity for me to make a stand with what little esteem I have left and pitch that sucker down the drain Instead I eat it, too. I think I even grimaced as it went down.
Now it’s about 30 minutes past my ingestion of what amounts to nine cookie dough pieces that equals 1,170 calories in at best five minutes. I have a literal headache. And if my stomach’s reaction and behavior tothe avalanche could be translated into English it would be saying WHAT THE FUCK!?!
The showers that just rolled in preclude me from getting on my bike and going for a 15-miler up to the zoo and back, so instead for the next hour or until Susan gets home (whichever comes first) I’ll be gliding/skiing on the exercise machine she got from Sharper Image. I may not be able to get this crap out of my system, but at least I can burn some of its calories.
Too bad I can’t burn idiocy.
Follow