Not an Honest Mistake

Sometime in September a guest to a party at my house brought me a container of dark chocolate covered cranberries.  This oh-so-polite person did not know me and did what all well brought up guests might do and showed up with a hostess gift.  How sweet, how kind, how bad for me.  I think I need to have a guard at my door at my next party to intercept all gifts that are just plain dangerous for me.  That means any candy, cookies, baked goods, sugared nuts, breads or otherwise forbidden foods.

For a month those chocolate cranberries sat in my cupboard untouched.  No one else in my house is interested in those.  If they had been nachos the rest of the house would have sucked them down before the party was over.

I thought I could use those tasty treats in a recipe I might make for someone else so I stowed them in the not often opened platter cabinet.   Out-of-sight, out-of-mind for me.  But then last week I needed a platter.  There they were, dark chocolate calling to me just as my body was at it’s monthly weakest.  I shut the door; no I slammed the door and left the house, as if I had just encountered a poltergeist.

The next day there they were.  I made the fatal mistake of actually opening the box, and having a few.  Once that seal was broken the devil was hold of me.  Over the week I would pop a couple of the tangy treats in my mouth each day.  Not too many, just a few and before I knew it the whole container was gone.  Only then did I actually look at the calorie count and calculate that I had eaten at least a pounds worth of calories.

In reality my body reacts very badly to sugar calories so even though it was only one pounds worth of calories I am sure that it reacted more like two pounds to me.  And the scales are unhappy with me.  The unfortunate truth is that for me eating even a small amount of bad for me food leads me to eat other forbidden items.  I work hard not to have a throw-in-the-towel mentality for a day when I eat something bad early on, but somehow it still happens.

I should have blogged about my cheat the first day it happened and then I could have invited all my skinny friends to run by my house and eat up the chocolate.  Lesson learned!  Yes mistakes happen, but making the same mistake over and over is not acceptable.  What’s the point of having a blog to keep me honest if I’m not using it for that?