Treat Mania

I’ve been on a diet since October last year and I’ve lost nearly 14kg so far. Only 6kg to go to my target weight. So, pretty successful. My wife started a few months before me and convinced me to join her, and it has actually been quite fun.

It’s not anything complicated, just tracking how many calories we consume and keeping it low for 5 days a week, and then eating “normally” on Wednesdays and Saturdays. I should say it’s especially uncomplicated for me because my wife does all the cooking 😬 The high days are supposed to keep our metabolisms relatively high. I don’t know if it really works that way, but they also have a secondary psychological effect: it makes it much easier to eat less on the low days when I know I am at most two days from being able to eat whatever I want - perhaps something I’ve specifically been craving.

At least… that’s how it worked at the beginning. As time has gone on I have found myself eating more and more garbage on the high days. I never really even used to eat that many treats or think about them that much, but now those two days a week are my only opportunity to have some, and I have to fit in as much as possible. It started with a Snickers bar after lunch, but otherwise normal, healthy food, and now I have a cupboard groaning with different types of chocolate, marshmallows, jellies, crisps, jellybeans, sweet-chili pistachios for some reason (the reason is that I have lost my mind). Every time we go to Aldi I find some new thing to add to my collection, and usually several donuts.

I have anxiety about my treat cupboard and I spend the rest of the week thinking about how I’m going to gorge myself on Wednesday and Saturday. Because the amount I can eat is still quite restricted even on those days, I never actually manage to finish anything before moving on to the new sweetness. I have half a bag of vegan marshmallows in there for the last six months that I never touch because a marshmallow is nearly a hundred calories, and if I have one that’s 30g of jellybeans I can’t eat. There’s things in there I’ve never even tried, because I can’t risk wasting my calorie budget on something I might not like, and miss out on some essential high-value treat (whatever that happens to be on any given day). If I skip lunch can I have a second Snickers as well as 100g of ice-cream? This is the type of question that consumes me.

So, that doesn’t seem like a particularly healthy relationship to food. But oh well, only 6kg to go, then I’m going to make a giant lasagna and eat that for three days in a row, and then hopefully go back to treat moderation instead of treat mania.