I had a major stress head on yesterday morning. I’m doing some self-development sponsored by my work this week, learning how to interpret and administer a psychometric tool, so I’m on a three day course in the city near where I live. I’d left home in plenty of time and it was all going so well, right up to the point that I went to turn into the road leading to the venue, only to discover the road was closed. Beautiful.
So it’s rush hour, twenty minutes before the course was due to start and I’m driving past where I need to be, in a one-way city loop with no idea how to double back and find a different way in. I know, I think to myself, I’ll call the hotel and ask them. And that would’ve been a really good plan if anyone had answered the fucking phone.
Almost exactly twenty minutes later, I figured it out, but not before I’d turned the air blue inside my car. By the time I’d parked up and done a fast hobble across to the hotel, through the lobby and up to the first floor I was utterly frazzled. My hair, which had looked styled and smooth when I left home had gone rogue on me. The more hot and bothered I got, the wilder my hair got, and by the time I arrived I looked like Albert Einstein. I had big sweat patches under my arms and my cheeks were a lovely mottled shade of purple, I mean we’re talking off-the-chart attractive.
As I half skidded in a very lopsided fashion into the middle of a bunch of delegates, my eyes were drawn like magnets to an enormous tray of bacon sandwiches. Then I caught a whiff of them, and it was pretty much game over…all thoughts of how frazzled I was disappeared, and the deal was just about sealed when some random bloke shook me by the hand and passed me a plate.
Now, bearing in mind this is week two of my experiment, and I’ve hit the point in my dieting week I’m supposed to eat all my weekly points. As I stood there salivating with the plate in my hand you bet your sweet ass I was furiously totting up how many points I’d need to knock off my tally. I could have it, one hundred percent guilt-free. Get in!
Except, I’d already had breakfast in the car on the way there. I’d made a coconut and mango breakfast smoothie with a base of unsweetened almond milk, and it’d been really thick and filling. It dawned on me that I wasn’t actually hungry.
Now, you’ve got to bear in mind that a small detail like that has very rarely stopped me from indulging myself in the past. And I don’t know what was so different in that moment, but yesterday, it did stop me. I wanted that bacon bap like you wouldn’t believe, but on the other hand I didn’t want it at all, so I listened to the voice of reason, and I put the plate down. I went into the bathroom and had a stern word with the birds nest on my head instead.
That was a wise decision as it turns out, because those bacon baps were not actually for the delegates of the course I was on. Turns out the bloke who handed me a plate assumed I was with his lot and that’s why he tried to feed me. As if looking like a mad professor wasn’t embarrassing enough, I narrowly avoided getting in bother for the unauthorised consumption of pig flesh.
It wasn’t the only bullet I dodged yesterday…I managed to sidestep a whole host of booby traps, including a bowl of ginger nuts and fruit shortbread biscuits which were staring me down from the coffee area, not to mention several unwise options at the lunch buffet. I had my weekly points in my back pocket, but strangely they didn’t burn a hole. I wasn’t bothered. I’d decided at the top of the week that I was going to treat me and my boy to Chinese food one night, and I was happy enough knowing that treat was coming. Decision made, move on.
That’s another step forward, right?
