So I tried a little experiment today. I’ve been reading a book this week called Atomic Habits and it’s been very fascinating and kind of validating to some of the changes in my life. But one of the chapters talked about how it’s really the anticipation of (insert bad habit) that you look forward to, not the actual doing or having of it. For the holiday months and into January my bad habit was eating dessert too often during the week. There’s a particular peanut butter square at a local restaurant that I would usually stop and get twice a week. It’s soooo good and it has to be 1000 calories or more. I haven’t had that since before the Super Bowl and really haven’t had any big desserts since I started blogging about this. It feels finally like my habits on that have been broken. What I’d like to do is get to a place where I can have dessert once a week and feel ok about it. I don’t want to live without sweet foods ever again in my life. And there’s no need for that. But my problem when I do have it is that it tends to happen too much. I was eating dessert 4-5 times a week, if not more some weeks from December thru the end of January. I’m i’m lucky I only gained a couple pounds back. This last few weeks I’ve lost that back plus a little bit. I’m at 275 this morning which is about as low as I’ve been since 2012. 8 more pounds would mark my lowest as an adult. I was 267 at one point in 2012.

So I wanted to try having the dessert today and really pay attention to the anticipatory feelings, vs the feelings while eating, and the feelings afterwards. One mistake I did make in this experiment was I ate in the same place and same speed and same way I always did before. It’s amazing to watch the autopilot on so many of these habits since reading the book. So the funny part of the story was this restaurant doesn’t sell those Peanut butter squares anymore lol. So i got another piece of pie they had and it was good. I definitely noticed that the real jones for me was the lead up, the buying it, and the driving home with it. By the time it became time to eat it, I was actually kind of depressed about it. Cause i knew i was going to eat it and not enjoy it and feel bad afterwards. And that prophecy was fulfilled. I don’t know if i learned anything from the experiment other than I still like pie and i still feel like a fat loser after eating it. So just gonna try to get back to the no dessert plan tomorrow and we’ll see how it goes.