The “bottomless pit” is alive and well.

I’ve been writing regularly about my upcoming 3 year maintenance anniversary and how my healthy habits are finally becoming automatic. So it’s only right that I record and report one colossal failure. I believe in baby steps forward so here’s one giant leap backward.

I know exactly why it happened. One day last week some sad news had me feeling down and awareness of my well-known past reactions didn’t change the situation. The ice cream was there, many cartons of the stuff stashed by DH, the junk food king. He keeps most of his junk food out of my sight, but we only have one freezer. The calories weren’t all from the ice cream. We also have a bottle of chocolate syrup in the fridge which I dumped liberally over my mountain of ice cream.

Something is different though. Yeah, I messed up. There’s no way my body needed that. Yet strangely, I don’t feel all that bad about it.

800 extra calories translates into at most 4 ounces. Even if every last calorie lands on my hips, my body’s destination of choice, I can get rid of that.

What I do realize is that I just can’t eat like that every night. You know, we used to do that, DH and me. We laughingly called it our nightly “ice cream ritual.” We have big bowls for ice cream and toppings. When filled, they look like Mt Vesuvius spewing lava, especially when we added a cherry on top.

The ice cream isn’t going away, but I found something else that might help – my mother’s old dessert dishes – the ones I remember as a child. They actually hold ½ cup of ice cream. So that’s where they get the “serving size!” They haven’t changed it since 1950.

The average American was a different size back then too. Maybe my goal should be to train my body to match those old dishes?