New Year’s Resolution: Starting over & your diet

It’s no small feat to start over. But we’ve all done it a million times. For example, we’ve all started our diet over a million times. Starting over is a beautiful, exciting thing. You can taste it, feel it, envision it. You imagine the victory at hand. The anticipation and daydreaming is as good as anything else.

The run-up
You start thinking about all the mini Milky Ways you’ve eaten in your lifetime. 5,000 easy. You start thinking, who needs them? They make you thick, slow and drowsy. What’s the sense? Every time you eat one, you think about how it’s your last one. Right after the next one.

The disgust
Pretty soon you can hardly enjoy a Milky Way. The more you think about them, as you eat them, the more you love to hate them.

To prove how “done” you are with them, you eat the whole bag in one sitting. You are sick for the next 12 hours. When your honey asks you what the problem is, you are evasive.

“Did you eat something different today?”

“No,” you say. And it’s not even a lie.

The kitchen clean-out
You go through the house next and eat anything with sugar in it. You think about throwing it out, but what a waste of food. You think about giving it to your kids, but why would you knowingly poison them? Better to take a hit for the team.
Every cupboard is bare, only fruit remains, bruised, in your path.

The after-effect
You make it through the sick streak. That’s it, you vow, never again. You’ve pushed your limits on the sweets and proven their dire effects. You eat a Twix while you think this. The more Twixes you eat, the greater your resolve that you can live without the Milky Ways.

The grocery store resolve
You literally dance your way through Tom’s. You will not go down the baking aisle. You will not stop at the candy aisle. You won’t so much as look at the cold wall of pop (liquid sugar, another favorite). No, you’re the queen of grocery store resolve, bypassing all the evil and buying more fruit in a day than you have in a month.

The breakdown
You are shocked and dismayed to find out the corner gas station does not keep hours past 10 p.m. You would have gone earlier but there were key family members around who’d borne witness to the kitchen clean-out.

You start rifling through the house. Cripes, there has to be something sweet here somewhere. It’s been two days. You haven’t lost a pound, have only wasted money on fruit, organic no less, and you just considered looking in the kids’ backpacks for food.

Wait. You’ve found it. A half opened bag of chocolate chips in the cupboard above the microwave. Expiration 2009. You must have missed this (consciously) during the clean-out, their value much less prominent in the face of a chocolate-caramel-nougat combination. Until now. Now just a morsel of chocolate will do, and do well.

Tomorrow, of course, you will start over.

Here’s to a year of starting over, doing better, laughing more, trying again and, of course, eating chocolate.