So about eight months ago I did the unthinkable.
I completely, 100% gave up biscuits, cakes, chocolate and sweets.
Honestly.
All of my staple foods wiped out in one go. Kablammo. It’s like a lion giving up gazelle, or a five year old giving up snot. I stopped. Just like that.
At the school I work at part time, they all scoffed in the staff room when I told them. Both as in “scoffed at me in disbelief” and as in “scoffed all the cakes because I wasn’t eating any of them anymore”. I even had to prove I’d quit by sniffing a chocolate log (easy tiger) without taking a slice.
I went on a school visit the other week and the lovely librarian had prepared me a massive plate of about sixty biscuits. I had to tell her that no, I’m not that man anymore. He’s gone.
There’s a half-eaten toblerone in the fridge. Normally, if I’d found out about this, I’d have been found sitting on the kitchen floor at three in the morning in my pants, shovelling it down my gob like a hungry Innuit. But no. Not this time. It’s still there. No need to tell the children that “the cheese must’ve eaten it”, whilst guiltily picking the last few crumbs out of my belly-button fluff.
“How could you do such a thing?” howled the picket line of now-unemployed Cadbury’s employees, as they marched on my house.
Well, the honest truth is that I don’t really know, actually. I just decided. I totted up my total of “treats” for one day and realised I’d consumed enough calories to power a small panel heater for a month.
Something had to change so I just quit.
And since last October, I haven’t eaten a single sweet treat. Not a (marzipan) sausage. Not a chocolate finger. Or even a chocolate fingertip. I couldn’t be prouder of myself. This has been my Everest and I’m so delighted I’ve managed to make it without slipping up once.
Well, apart from on my birthday of course. I mean, you’ve got to have cake on your birthday, right? And a few biscuits. And you always have cake left over as well, so the days after your birthday don’t count either. And, obviously, this applied to my daughter’s birthday as well, and the week after that. And her birthday party which wasn’t on the same day as her actual birthday. And the week after that as well. And Christmas. And, when you think about it, you can’t possibly include my Father’s Day chocolates, which lasted me a good while. Or the millionaire’s shortbread bites round at my friends’ house, which they’d so lovingly bought. And there was that lunchbag for my youngest. I’m not a monster am, I? I can’t let him eat a whole gingerbread man by himself. And the cake stall at the school summer fayre? Well that was for a good cause so I had to buy a few things there. And…
Oh dear.
At least I tried, right?