Thursday, August 23, 2007

Lack of willpower

Every Thursday my group at work has "tea time." We brew a pot of tea, and eat snacks. It's a break from the work week, a chance to socialize for half an hour to an hour. A lot of good conversations start at tea time, from learning about people's off-hours lives to finally getting a chance to have a face-to-face conversation about a bug that keeps going back and forth between development and quality engineering.

I am a very social eater. If others are eating, I am eating. I struggle with this every Thursday. I plan around it, play tricks on myself, eat a fruit immediately beforehand, etc. And every Thursday I feel guilty when I eat more than I should have.

Today was no different. I was the only manager representing my immediate team there, so I felt the need to stay there (and not go back to my desk after the first 15 minutes, one of my "tricks" to avoiding pigging out) and be social. Of course, that meant nibbling on jelly beans and cashews and candy-coated peanuts....

As I felt guilty about it later in the evening, I berated myself for having no willpower, for being weak-spirited.

And then I looked at the calendar. 23 days of exercise in a row, as of today.

I have plenty of willpower. I just have to focus it.

Side note: we've been doing a lot of experimentation with cooking at home, to save money and be more healthy. Today we learned we don't really like Sage that much, certainly not as the primary spice in a side dish. Anybody want some leftover white bean salad?

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