Office Hell

Yesterday started out wonderful. I had an 11 hour shift ahead of me, so I had to prep food for the day. I made my morning protein smoothie:

 

1/4-1/3 cup Chobani plain nonfat yogurt, 1 cup sliced strawberries, maybe 1/2 cup unsweetened vanilla Almond Breeze milk, a scoop of protein powder, 2 tbsp ground flax seed, a large handful of baby spinach leaves, and 1/2 cup of water or however much it takes to get it to mix well.

This has been my standard breakfast for some time now (when I actually get around to having breakfast). It takes a few minutes to make it, but I can easily drink it on my way to work. I like to have good apples on hand so I can get at least those 2 servings of fruit in early.

I prepped my food for the day to take to work. I took baby carrots, zucchini tots (post on those soon), and celery with peanut butter for snacks. For lunchtime I took chicken and salad, had a few of the zucchini tots, and a flourless zucchini brownie. Sounds nice and clean, right? 

 I drank my smoothie and ate my apple on the way in the car and about 10 am I went back to the kitchen to get a few zucchini tots for mid morning snack. Little did I know, it was the office manager's birthday, so I walked into the kitchen to find this:

 

O. Em. Gee. My nemesis: gourmet cupcakes from a local bakery. Now don't get me wrong- I love plain bakery cupcakes just as much as the gourmet ones, and truth be told, if you put ANY cupcake in front of me I can inhale it in 2 seconds flat. It's a sickness. I know. But THESE cupcakes were sitting right in front of me for the taking! I grabbed my snack and got the hell out of there. All morning long, I had to listen to the girls talk about the cupcakes in the back, how one was going to skip her lunch and eat a cupcake instead, and how someone had tried the double chocolate one and it was the best thing she had ever tasted. Besides all of that talk, in my mind, I was VERY well aware of those cupcakes sitting back there. Thinking back on it now, it really is sad that those stupid things took up so much of my thought process yesterday morning. If I wasn't wondering how good the chocolate pretzel one would taste, I was psyching myself up to NOT give in and scarf one down the next time I went back to the bathroom.

Lunchtime came and I had to sit back there, at that table, in front of those cupcakes, and eat my lunch. But I never once made eye contact with them. Not once. A few others were cutting some in half to try half of one, half of another, talk, talk, talk, cupcake, cupcake, cupcake. It was torture. But I did it. I ate my flourless zucchini brownie and I resisted those damn cupcakes. I even rejoiced a little when someone said that the chocolate covered pretzel on top of the chocolate pretzel cupcake was stale.

I made it through lunch, and had 6 hours left. Just as I was planning on going back to get my afternoon snack of carrots, one of the girls came around the corner and excitedly announced, "There are cookies back there now!". SON of a biotch.

Can it get any worse??

It did. I ate one. And then one more on my next bathroom trip back there. And then one more on my way out the door at the end of my shift.

Fail.

It was like something took over and I wasn't even thinking anymore. They just jumped into my mouth. On the way home, I was tired, defeated, and it was getting late and I was hungry. My boys all ate dinner at other places, and my husband was going to eat the leftover steak (shocker!) and potatoes for dinner. I didn't even want to eat at that point. I knew I needed to even though it was after 8. I remembered that I had bought a few pouches of tuna for quick grabs, so I mixed one with some of the Paleo mayo that I made the day before (another post later) and put it on top of baby spinach leaves, with a tomato and some thin red onion slices. I also sprinkled on a little shredded cheddar. I don't care how 'clean' or 'unclean' cheese is considered- I will probably NEVER give that up. Anyway, that salad was awesome. A perfect cap to a good day gone wrong.

I then had to have my last zucchini brownie and then the celery and peanut butter to help curb my urge to snack some more. I don't know if the cookies set something off in my mind that made me want to eat more sugar, or if I was subconsciously thinking that I already 'blew it' for eating clean that day, so I might as well keep going. Either way, I was okay with the choices I made for snacks, even though I know I didn't REALLY even need to eat them.

So that is what a day with my sugar addiction looks like. I am working on breaking the addiction, and I know that even though I have every intention to eat clean, sometimes there are going to be bad choices made- especially at the beginning. I have to make good choices at the grocery store and not buy things that will trigger my addiction, but yet, I do need to buy some snacks for the rest of my family.

On a good note: I work at a medical practice, so I have a nasty habit of weighing myself. Every. Single. Morning. On Monday morning, I was at my all time highest non-pregnancy weight. That is what kicked this clean eating in to high gear. The good thing is that yesterday (Wednesday), my weight is down 2.4 pounds since Monday. I'm sure there was some bloating involved and maybe some extra water weight that day, but I have been doing this daily scale thing for the past year, and I am used to the ups and the downs on a daily basis. Like I said, it's a nasty habit. I am just happy it was a 'down' and it is encouraging to me to see that.