Habits, Cupcakes & 25%

When it comes to habits, my husband has been a bad influence on me in regards to desserts.  I would occasionally have a sweet dessert after dinner, but when hubby and I moved in together, desserts became a lot more frequent which was not good for my waist line (or my pants, or tops). To make matters worse, the hubster also ate dessert after lunch as well, which eventually rubbed off on me and as it turned out, these were not good habits for me to form.

I hadn't really thought of having dessert as 'a habit', it was always something that accompanied dinner, it was part of the meal, not an extra.

"It's noice, it's norrrmal"

Yes, dessert is nice, very nice and it is the normal thing to do after a meal, well that's what I thought anyway.  It hasn't been until recently (with the start of my health blitz) that I discovered that it isn't necessary to have dessert after every meal, therefore, it is a habit and a habit I am glad to break.

In weeks 2 & 3 of my health blitz my focus was on desserts.  I decided to have dessert as often as I wanted, but it had to be fresh fruit with or without yoghurt, this way the dessert still stayed relatively healthy.  If I still feel the need to eat after dinner I have some fruit, but on other days when I want a little sweetness I just add some vanilla yoghurt.  I have found lately that many nights I am not even interested in dessert and completely go without.  Is my dessert habit breaking???

I think the dessert habit has broken at night, but what about lunch?  I often have a sweet craving after I have eaten my lunch so I go back to the fridge and just search for something sweet.  I don't really want fruit cause I know I will be having fruit later and we all know what a disaster it would be if I had more fruit - more fruit, how dare you! 

Anyway, I found a cupcake, yes, just one cupcake in the fridge the other day and decided to have that for my lunch dessert.  The second it came out of the fridge the seagulls kids swarmed me all wanting one.  

A lonely cupcake

Because there was only 1 cupcake it had to be shared.  I cut the cupcake into 4 and we each had a quarter.  As you can imagine, a quarter of a cupcake is not a very big piece, but it was enough for me, it had to be because there was none left.

My sweet craving was satisfied with a tiny piece of cake

This is very good news for me having the knowledge that I can be satisfied with a fraction of the amount that I usually eat when it comes to cravings and food in general really.  I have decided to implement another element to my health blitz called the 25% Principle.  If I can be happy with just a quarter of a cupcake then why can't I use this technique when it comes to other foods as well?  There is nothing stopping me from doing this except greed and the only results I can foresee are good ones.  The 25% Principle can only make me happier and healthier.