The Cream Puff Effect

The week started with a 4 course meal at Gary Danko, including a beautiful duck entree, an amazing cheese course and a rich chocolate souffle.  This unbelievable meal and the accompanying hangover was answered by an enormous turkey/avocado sandwich from the deli on the corner.  Then came the Yank Sing appetizers prior to an agency happy hour, followed by pizza during a lunch meeting the next day.  The weekend brought a surf and turf dinner of grilled steak and prawns swimming in butter solidified with several bottles of amazing wine in Sonoma.  I was awoken the next morning with the sweet, buttery aroma of fresh, homemade cinnamon buns.  The afternoon BBQ in Berkeley resulted in a scrumptious grilled hot dog only to be washed down by a dixie cup full of beer.

And as if all this were insufficient, my week was punctuated with a Beard & Pappa cream puff during a morning meeting.  Is it even possible to resist this creamy, flaky goodness?  I think not.

What's a poor Weight Watcher like me to do with all of this amazing food at my fingertips???!  It's like the indulgent start to my week with a divine dinner at Gary Danko snowballed (or in this case, cream-puffed) into caloric chaos.  Because I knew I had already used my flex points on Day 1, was there really any reason to try to make up for it the rest of the week?

In a meeting a while back, I heard someone explain that they only consider their food intake in 15 minute increments.  In other words, if they just stuffed half a cheese plate down their throat before dinner, they didn't write off the whole meal, but considered the next 15 minutes to be a clean slate in which to do better.  Usually if I have a moment of indulgence, I try to stick to this principle and let go of the mistake quickly in order to move on to the next chance to make a better choice.  I try not to fall into the "oh-fuck-it" spiral and get lost in endless abandon.

Not really sure what happened this week, but now that I'm stacked with a fresh plate of points, it's time to start over.  In the meantime, I'm pretty excited to hop on the scale and scope the extent of the damage in t-minus 5 hours.  NOT.