17 Days Sober

Every year my sister gives up something for lent and impresses us all by actually making it through the forty days without eating chocolate or drinking fizzy cold drinks and every year I give up chocolate for about a week and then treat myself to about one hundred Easter eggs to make me feel better about my failure. But this year EVERYTHING has changed. Heather (the sisterling) has decided that for lent she is going to be a vegan and her commitment to the cause has inspired me to give up chocolate, for real this time.

It seems to me that, from an outsider’s perspective, giving up chocolate would be really easy but anyone who has ever lived with me or knows me really well knows that this is a nearly impossible task. You see the problem is that I am a chocoholic and usually eat chocolate once a day if not more. I eat chocolate when I’m sad, hungry, irritated, happy, grumpy, angry, or excited and then afterwards I eat more chocolate because I feel guilty for eating an entire slab of chocolate.

I absolutely love chocolate.

But, I have made the decision and I have to stick to it, not because I am religious (I’m not religious at all actually), or because I am stubborn, or because I made a promise to myself. No, I have to go through with this because it has come to my attention that I have a commitment issue. Well, I have several commitment issues actually but now that I have (finally) realized it, I fully intend to alter it.

And so, step one of the plan is to commit myself to forty days without chocolate. Step two will be to get my ass into the gym on a regular (no, I don’t mean once a month) basis. And I will figure out step three if I ever actually get there. But for the meantime I somehow have to figure out how to walk into a supermarket without wanting to drown myself in a swimming pool filled with melted chocolate because people are starting to notice me crying in the veggie isle and I think it’s freaking them out.