It’s been a few weeks since my last confession and I really don’t know where to start. My attempt to refrain from eating sugar these last few weeks has been an insane uphill battle and an epic fail. Actually I was doing fine until the inventory weekend at my work. I work at a pipe yard and every employee had to stay there the whole weekend to help out and then go another week without any time off. Just the idea of that was stressing me out not to mention the pressure that went along with it. I work on the IT team and for a month we had been working with our new outdoor wireless infrastructure and the borrowed scan guns, another story for another time, to make sure it would all be ready for the counting adventure. If the technology didn’t hold out then it was going to be even less pretty than it already was for everyone involved. Seventy two scan guns running around the yard can be a pretty heavy load on the system if allot of the people ended up in one spot scanning or allot of people wound up encased in a metal warehouse surrounded by towers of pipe. And yes these events actually took place later that day causing serious wireless connectivity issues. So needless to say my stress level was pretty high even before it all got started at 5:30 am for the IT team and 6:30 for everyone else.
After three hours a truck came through handing out snacks but all they had were snack size candy packages and water. I have to admit that I had brought my own snacks in anticipation of this little problem but I was stressed and chose to be naughty and take the candy, blaming the powers that be for not thinking of the healthy eaters out there. I know…it wasn’t their fault; it was my sin to bear, but it made me feel better for all of two minutes.
Two hours later after all the hours of hustling through the sandy pipe yard, covered in dirt from the toes of my steel toe boots to the last strands of my hair, helping people get their scan guns working again and answering general inventory type questions, I was more than ready to go to our scheduled half hour lunch at 11:30. The candy had already started my downward slope and it just got worse. Lunch consisted of a box meal from Pot Belly’s (love their sandwiches) and those boxes come with a sandwich, chips and two cookies. This amount of food, when you look at it in a calorie intake viewpoint, is enough to feed two people minus the cookies. Knowing my control had already been weakened I looked for my sugar sponsor. Yes I did self elect a sugar sponsor. When I sat down I was determined to be good but, feeling sorry for myself, I ate EVERYTHING (the food for two) and then picked up one of the cookies. I could see her watching me out of the corner of my eye when that cookie somehow found its way into my hand and began to make its slow motion trek to my mouth. I heard her tell me not to do it, but like Nemo defiantly hitting the butt (boat) when his dad told him not to, I bit into the cookie and grinned at her. I was that determined to ignore the bells going off in my head and defy her warning.
I was frustrated and depressed about the situation and told myself it was OK to do this, to make myself feel better. But as many of us with this problem already know, it just made me feel worse for not being strong enough. So now I’m trying to figure out how to alter my mental habits so that there’s another response to frustration that doesn’t include cookies, cake and candy. Again, I’m at that point I was before with smoking; altering my mindset. It’s not about the chemical addiction anymore. But so far I haven’t found a book yet, at least not from my digging, that addresses this part of the problem. Maybe during my search on Amazon today I’ll hit pay dirt. I’m determined to get there and I think as long as I have the desire, I’ll finally make it. I refuse to give up and when I learn the secret I’m going to spread it far and wide. For now, I’m soldiering on.