There’s a game I like to play with myself whenever I’m going to make a bad food decision: I’m not allowed to indulge unless I think long and hard about what fast food restaurant will hit the sweet (read: salty) spot.
After all, there’s nothing quite like the regret I feel when the 10-piece chicken nugget meal at McDonald’s I’ve splurged on is met with nausea, not satisfaction.
Take Friday night for example. Done with another great week at my internship, I knew I was going to celebrate in some drive-thru line before the night was over. But nothing sounded good. So I settled in with one of my classic egg sandwiches and Law and Order: Criminal Intent.
And then it hit me. The perfect treat for that quiet weekend night was a Dairy Queen cocoa fudge sundae.
The average DQ customer probably doesn’t know anything about this cousin of classic hot fudge. But my obsession with cocoa fudge is a lasting legacy of my two-year stint in a DQ visor.
So I locked up the pride of cats I’ve been petsitting this week and headed off down the interstate toward Centerville, Utah.
One short wait in the drive-thru line later and I was reunited with a snack that tastes like seventeen, small-town Illinois and a long afternoon shift.
I love that feeling of figuring out exactly what I’m craving.
With a mind that rarely sits still, it isn’t often that I can smile and know that I got the better of my fickle brain.
But that calm melts away like the top of my sundae did during the drive home and I’m left with more choices and more chances to get a 99-cent Frosty when what I really wanted was a Chick-fil-a chocolate shake.
I’m not always a good decision-maker, but when I listen to my heart and my mind and, yes, my stomach, too, the outcome is as sweet as a cocoa fudge sundae.