How I Put The Cookie Down

I’m just getting back from a mini-vacation where I spent 5 days on a cruise in the Caribbean. It was a good balance of work and play, but interestingly for me, it was also an opportunity for indulgence.

Typically I try to limit the amount of sugar I eat. I often decline dessert and avoid sweets because I know how it impacts my mood and sleep. However, for this cruise I chose to give myself more leeway and enjoy a reasonable amount of dessert (one serving a night) as my way of enjoying the all-inclusive experience.

I bring this all up because I had a personal development spotlight moment on the flight home. For whatever reason, as part of the in-flight snacks I was offered two Oreo cookies. I reached out, grabbed them, and unconsciously started eating the first. 

One of my food rules is “don’t eat things whose ingredients you can’t pronounce”, so mid-bite I read the Oreo wrapper and realized I had violated my rule.

Now I had a decision to make: Was I going to eat the other cookie or not? Typically it would be an easy “no”, but since I was transition out of having dessert on the cruise, I was starting to justify that I could have sweets until I got home, rationalizing that the flight home still counted as vacation.

I picked up the second cookie and was about to eat it when I asked myself an important question: “Will I regret this, or will this feel out of integrity when I reflect on this tonight?” The answer to that was a quick “yes”.

So I took fast-action and put the cookie down back in the wrapper out of arms reach. Then when the flight attendant came by with a trash bag, I tossed it without hesitation. In both ways I leveraged environmental design so that my behavior aligned with my intention.

I know eating one more Oreo cookie wouldn’t have been the end of the world. It would have been a harmless thing to do. But by taking action as definitively as I did, I reestablished my higher standard and set the course for my transition back into my normal routine.