I am halfway through a 4-serving box of bear-shaped graham crackers, having been dunking them in a jar of almond butter as I sip a glass of whiskey. That’s when I pause.

It’s been a month since I finished Whole30.

I wish I could say that it changed my eating habits for the better, but what’s more real is that it feels like a whole lot of history repeating.

(Cue up that track, and I’ll explain.)

As I was saying…

Hello, and welcome to my backslide.
It started innocuously enough.

I was so excited to eat beans again. I knew I’d be happy to have yogurt and cheese back, and I was, but OH, was I happy about beans. I had a whole friggin’ can of these gorgeous Giant Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce. I basically did a chair dance of joy with every bite.
Hummus?
Humus was BACK, baby. My office has been flooded with tubs of hummus recently and I was READY for it.
Lentils?
COME TO BUTTHEAD.

But then there was the other stuff.

Pi Day came around, and that evening, I didn’t feel like pie so much as I felt like ice cream. So I made up a little mixture of something that turned out like apple pie filling, very yummy, and topped it with some ice cream.
But I didn’t go with real-people ice cream.
It was that eat-the-pint, super low calorie kind of ice cream.
It wasn’t even the good kind, it was the cheapo store brand.
And it was fine.
And I ate it.
But I wish I had just gotten a scoop of good ice cream. Yeah, it would have been more caloric, even if I had eaten the whole pint of shitty fake ice cream. But I would have enjoyed it more. Instead, I had fakety fake-ass tasting “sea salt caramel” frozen bleh that tasted like a mall candle store and was about as creamy as frozen Pepto-Bismol.

Message received, taste buds.
I forgot we were done with that shit.
I forgot we were doing it right or we weren’t doing it at all.

But then the weekends came. And the social engagements. So the treat eating was back in my life, and that was fine, if more frequent than usual, making up for lost time.
NBD.

And then came The Bad Habits.
GODDAMMIT.
The Bad Habits are back.

Snacking on things around the office because I can.
Not meal planning and just scavenging from what I can find.
But the most insidious of them was back with a brute force:
Idly eating a ton of random stuff after dinner (often IMMEDIATELY after dinner) while I sit around and watch TV.

This isn’t a huge problem when I don’t get to spend much time at home, which is probably how the habit started. “I’m here and relaxing, and that’s rare, so let’s kick back and eat whatever is in the kitchen.” But right now, I have a LOT of free time in the evenings. I’ve been watching way more TV than usual, which I’m fine with, as it’s all good programming. But it never seems to fail that more often than not, I will end up going to grab the bag of chocolate chips left over from baking, the jar of almond butter, the bag of dried cherries, the how-bad-can-they-be-I-got-them-at-Whole-Foods multigrain crisps, the half-wheel of vegan cheese, the box of crappy cookies someone gave me at Christmas, the drawer of candy that other people gave me, etc.

Idle hands are the devil’s playground.
Idle jaws are the devil’s garbage disposal.

Tack onto that the past week, which was the birthday of my boyfriend who had been out of town for a month and a half, which meant a lot of celebration eating and drinking, and folks — I feel like butt.

“Dana, you love butts!”
Not literal butt; figurative butt. And not the kind of thing where literally can now LITERALLY mean figuratively. And not sexy figurative butt either.
“So what are you going to do, Dana, are you going back on Whole30?”
Are you high? No.

But I am going back on track with taking care of myself. 30 days of being forced to basically cook everything myself resulted in 30 days of behaving like a petulant child who doesn’t want to eat their vegetables — or in my case, cook their vegetables.

“Hey, isn’t avoiding this backlash part of the reason Donnelle quit midway through?”
YES, FINE, YOU WIN, DONNELLE.

However now, I’m going to try to return to many of the parts of Whole30 that worked for me when it comes to ordinary daily eating. I’m going to stay hella mindful and not go on nightly snack benders. No drinking at home on weeknights. BUT I’m also going to make sure that I choose my treats and indulgences specifically AND that I do it right.
Pint of bullshit candle-tasting low cal ice cream? Nah.
A cup of beautiful ice cream from Salt & Straw. Fuck yeah.

Now if only I could find a safe that I could store my chocolate chips in which require proof of baking in order to unlock them. Touch ID, only there needs to be a thin layer of flour on your thumb for it to work.

UGH FINE, self control it is.