Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2011

Fishy way to boost willpower

I've decided that in order to look at least halfway presentable I just have to keep all the sweet stuff out of the house. All of it.

This declaration was met with a lot of resistance.

"So, just because you have no willpower, the rest of us have to suffer?" my husband, Jerry, asked after I explained the new arrangement.

"Exactly."

Because I just can't help it. I'll be 40 this month and, if nothing else, I've learned that willpower against sweets is probably not something I'm going to learn anytime soon.

I don't know what I'm going to do about Halloween, and don't even get me thinking about Thanksgiving or Christmas - Reese's Cups, pie, ice cream. I can't be trusted around any of it.

But then I started to feel a little guilty. Husband and son are two hungry boys and they're both so, well, skinny.

What if I bought gross snacks - things I knew I wouldn't eat - like oatmeal pies with the nasty cream in the middle.

It only took a day or two before I was eating those, thinking to myself, "You know, these aren't half bad."

Next I bought Pecan Twirls - those dry, circular cakes with stale pecans mashed in.

But they have a certain charm when you unroll the whole cake and wash it down with a Diet Mountain Dew.

This wasn't working at all.

I next considered Fig Newtons, a true embarrassment to high fructose deliciousness.

I couldn't imagine how I could deign to "sneak" a Fig Newton (and would that even be cheating?), but I didn't trust myself, so I went back to my original moratorium.

No sweet snacks.

But today I discovered there may be a way the boys can have their oatmeal pies and eat them too.

As I was making a fruit salad for my 8-year-old son Tyler's end-of-the-year baseball party, Jerry came home from a ride and started making a tuna fish sandwich right next to me.

"Really?" I asked. "You're seriously going to open that nastiness right next to me?"

It's hard to describe how gross tuna fish is to me, but I'll try. Let's see: cat food, the garbage can with the lid open.

Then it dawned on me.

I could just open a few cans of tuna and set them around the house like dead-body-smell air fresheners.

Then I won't want to eat - at all.

There's nothing like a little dry-heaving to keep you motivated.

Skinny jeans and 40, here I come.