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I did some alcoholic math the other day, and it had been awhile. But I was reminded of perhaps my favorite slogan about what it means to be an addict: One is too many, and a thousand is never enough.
To summarize, if one is good, you better hide the rest, because I’m coming for it, whatever it is.
In this case, I am trying to lose some weight. My biggest vice is from about 8 pm to midnight. I’ll have a reasonable dinner and be cruising along, then the seal breaks and I absolutely crush some package of chips or cookies. If there are peanut butter cups within 40 miles of me, I will smell them and eat them, too.
Lately, I have been doing pretty well with having two small cookies right after dinner, then two cookies much later, right before I go to bed. I have a little bit of a snack, then I still have something to look forward to before I turn in for the night. If that sounds a little like the way I used to count drinks and pills, well, you’re not wrong.
I was doing quite well with that recently until I opened up the package the other night and found seven cookies left. Hmm, what to do? This is where my masters degree in alcoholic math kicked in. I thought to myself, if I eat two cookies now and two cookies later tonight, that leaves me with three. But three does me no good. What’s the point of three? I need four. If I have three left, I might as well have none, because I need four.
I decided to run some quick calculations. Let’s see… 7-2-2=3… but for tomorrow, that leaves 3-2-2, which equals -1 … yep, okay, I got the answer: I should just eat all 7 cookies. Like, right now.
And that’s what I did. I don’t know what happened to eating several cookies after dinner and then several closer to bedtime. But all seven went right down the hatch. This is exactly what I did with drugs and alcohol. I’d have one beer left sometimes, and think, what’s the point of one beer? I either need 24 of them, or 0. No in-between. I remember having one Vicodin once for like two days as I tried to round up more. I just kept thinking, why bother with one? I needed closer to the 1,000 mentioned in the slogan I said at the beginning.
But that left me in the same spot as I used to be when I was drinking and drugging: A look in the mirror where I wonder, geez, man, do you have no self-control? You just flushed an important goal of yours down the toilet, and what do you have to show for it? What is the real difference between four cookies and seven cookies? Is your self-esteem better? Are you a better husband or dad?
The answer is no! I just wanted the freaking cookies because they are delicious!
The thing that is a little tougher about food boundaries is that I have to eat. I didn’t have to drink 12 beers in two hours, or eat 45 Percocet in a day. In fact, those things were killing me. Cookies won’t kill me, or if they do, it will take awhile. Cookies haven’t almost cost me my job or gotten me arrested for being over the legal limit. With food, I have some wiggle room.
So I don’t need Cookie Rehab, or at least not yet. But hey, save me a seat if Cookie Rehab does exist!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
A woman called the Al-Anon hotline and said, “My husband just finished off a liter of vodka, passed out, and fell flat on the floor. I can’t wake him. I think he’s dead.”
The Al-Anon on duty tried to reassure her, saying in a calm, soothing voice, “Don’t get excited. First, let’s make sure that he’s really dead.”
There was a half-minute of silence, a gunshot, then the wife’s voice: “Okay, what do I do next?”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, March 2002, Wil H. from Arlington, Virginia)
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