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Confessions of a Chocolate Hoarder

Posted on March 8, 2013. Filed under: Running | Tags: balance, challenge, change, character, chocolate, fitness, food, goals, half marathon, health, inspiration, marathon, mental discipline, mental-health, mind/body connection, morethanrunning, running, self discipline |

I’m off chocolate.  Again.  Soon, at least.  Probably Sunday.

I have this scary addictive kind of relationship with chocolate. Once I get started, I have a hard time stopping.

It’s not the sugar in it that gets me.  It’s the chocolate.  I can do without all other kinds of sugary things.

Soda?  Never.

Juice? I don’t get it.  Why drink a fruit when you can eat it instead?

Cakes, pies, donuts, hard candies, Skittles, licorice, you name it. If it doesn’t contain chocolate, I don’t want it.  It’s an easy pass.

Once I’m off chocolate, it’s gone, out of my life.  That is, the idea of chocolate—its shadow or form, if you will—may exist in my mind (thanks a lot, Plato), but chocolate disappears from my home and from my physiological desire. I don’t need it anymore.

While I’m on it, however, it changes me.  I am not the generous, sure-go-ahead-and-borrow-my-car-for-a-week kind of gal I usually like to be.  Not if it involves chocolate.

No, you can’t have a bite of my death by chocolate cake.  Slice your own piece.

What do you mean you want one of my Reese’s peanut butter cups?  There are only 2.  I have none to spare.

Selfish.  A chocolate hoarder.  That’s what I become.  And, yes, please take my car for a week.  That leaves me so much more time to sit home with my boxes of Girl Scout cookies and count them into nice, neat stacks.  One for me. One for me.  Two for me. Two for me.  Now that’s my idea of fun.

It’s the getting off chocolate that’s not much fun.  It only takes a few days, but during those dog days (even if it’s March), I even dream in chocolate.

So if it does all that, you might ask, why did I get back on?

It’s complicated.

See, there’s Easter, which weasels in to the local stores sooner with every year, and with Easter comes the dread Cadbury Egg.  And, of course, it’s Girl Scout cookie season, which may or may not have similarities to deer season.  And in between, I have a birthday.  What is a birthday if not a day to eat chocolate cake?

But, of course, there is more.  I met my running goal.  My white-slate refrigerator side is once again empty, and I have no new goal visibly posted.  There are goals in my head to get me through November, but until they are written, broken down into their daily tasks, organized into a training calendar, and pinned up in my kitchen, chocolate gets free reign.

So Sunday is the day.  The day that daylight savings time begins. The day after my birthday.  The day I will do laundry, so that the jeans that have been worn into looseness will tighten back up and cling in ways they were not intended to.  I will create my training plans and post them.

Once again, it will be death to chocolate rather than death by chocolate.

Wish me luck.

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