Paradise Lost

When I counseled my gastric bypass patients on weight loss, I would tell them to stop assigning moral labels to certain foods. "Broccoli is not ordained by God as 'good' while potato chips are declared 'evil'. Salad doesn't come from heaven anymore than cookies come from Satan." I would say. I wanted them to think of food as fuel and not as a reward/punishment, means of comfort, or mark of righteousness or moral failure. I wanted them to focus on their goal of weight loss and better health with food intake as a means of achieving that goal.

Well, I've found perhaps the most evil foodstuff EVER. It's from the depths of Hades, born from the wicked lord of the underworld...It's Nestle's Toll House Cookie Dough--the family size tub! Just scoop and bake. Bake?! That cookie dough isn't going to see an oven--it's going straight into my gullet!

I had a hankering for a brownie sundae but was too lazy to make the brownies. Kevin suggested some ready made cookie dough from the supermarket + ice cream + Hershey's Chocolate syrup = voila! A yumminess unparalleled. In the dairy section, nestled between the butter and the biscuit dough in the pop-open rolls, that magical plastic tub called to us with its siren song of chocolately goodness. I picked it up and it weighed about 4 metric tons.

Kevin and I proceed to eat the entire tub in 36 hours--some of the dough graced our oven and emerged as warm, gooey cookie platforms for scoops of ice cream while the majority of the tub contents were consumed raw. Yep, we have 4 metric tons of cookie dough that will sit in our colons for weeks.

I deemed it evil because its content and the volume consumed was completely incompatible with achieving race weight for Longhorn 70.3 in 6 weeks. Really there's nothing profoundly immoral about it at all--I just wanted to dramatically assign blame to a wonderful and convenient baking product instead of accepting my derailment of achieving a goal. I won't go on a 30 mile run to burn it all off. I'll just keep training like I have been and try again for nutritional excellence. So I ate some extra empty calories. BFD. The food Nazis aren't going to cook me in the gas chamber for it. The triathlon Gestapo won't torture me with extra swim workouts. So no point in me punishing myself for it, right? I can let go of the drama. That is, until tomorrow when another epic battle between good and evil shall be waged...;)