I once read a web comic about a man who hated his co-worker. The man gifted his co-worker a fancy, expensive coffee set. Why? So that his co-worker would get hooked on the expensive coffee and be forced to buy it forever more. Thanks to my wife, I may now have that same problem, but with sausages...
My diet was going quite well for the first three weeks or so. There was a bit of a hiccup during my birthday camping trip, but I was soon back on track... up until Father's Day happened. My lovely wife entered me in one of those "tag your blah" type Facebook competitions for Father's Day and won me a $100 voucher at my local fancy butcher.
Now I am in no way a consumer of "fancy"; I buy the cheapest cuts at Coles, just as I buy the cheapest beer, scotch, coffee, clothes, petrol, flights... whatever - I just can't justify the additional cost. BUT, walking into a fancy butcher with $100 to spend, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enjoy the good stuff free of financial guilt, I treated myself to a quality eye fillet, a dry-aged rib eye, a rack of beef ribs, and a few fancy sausages. THEY. WERE. FUCKING. DELICIOUS! The rib eye was very nice, the eye fillet was breath-taking, the beef ribs came out great after smoking them in my 80-year-old Japanese kamado, but the sausages... they were life-altering! After three decades of vaguely enjoying the "thin BBQ sausages" from Coles without a single thought given to what better options may be out there, I for the first time had a sausage with flavour, with juiciness, with... I literally just now stopped writing this journal to go fry up a single fancy sausage!
"My name is TDX00 and I'm addicted to Jalapeno Cheese sausages."
A notable advantage of a calorie counted diet is that you can eat pretty much anything, so long as you count it. That said, I've always stuck to things I can count with a high level of accuracy, because I know how easily I let things slide when that accuracy goes to shit and I have to start "guesstimating". But how do I accurately count random jalapeno cheese sausages from a butcher? I don't even know what kind of animal I'm eating! In the throws of starvation and temptation, I use the lack of accuracy to falsely justify having another beer or a few bites of the dinner my son never eats. Once that happens, the next classic hit on my old "Yet Another Failed Diet" playlist is, "Well your diet is fucked for today so start fresh tomorrow". I drink two more beers, finish off my son's dinner, then snack on whatever I can find until bedtime. The last track on the playlist is, "Tomorrow never comes". By morning I've convinced myself that my diet is ruined, and then it's off to KFC for an early lunch.
I see this failed diet pattern happening, just as it has so many times before. I'm writing this journal entry to help call out my own bullshit and prevent it from happening again. I'm not going to let fancy sausages derail this diet, no matter how delicious they are! This is my last chance to lose enough weight to be the father I want to be while my kids are still young enough to need me around. Jalapeno Cheese flavoured failure is not an option!
