DK’s Donuts (in Los Angeles) is a dangerous place, but I’m sure you have something similar near you. Take a few seconds to scroll down and check the pictures out. At that point, you have a few choices. Keep reading, go out and get a sweet treat, or close this window out and try to purge the thought of delicious food from your short-term memory. Either way, we’re tempted every day by various things that make us want to break away from what we feel is the right thing to do.
We want to let you know that you can have your cake and eat it too as long as you’re completely honest with yourself about it. The original title of this post was the urge to cheat, but we always create these negative associations for some reason. Let’s try to keep things positive for a bit and use the approach of redirection. Try to think instead in the two following ways.
You have bad treats and you are the judge of what is a bad treat. I would consider any illegal activity a bad treat, but a bad treat can also be a lesser of two evils with it’s “good alternative” being the good treat. (We’ll touch on that in a short bit.) Your challenge is to avoid ALL bad treats by redirecting yourself to what we’re going to call a good treat. We don’t want to use crazy names here because our main goal is to simplify the thinking process and stay positive.
Next, we have good treats, which are our friends in this effort to avoid cheating by treating. When faced with the decision to do something that you’d consider wrong (cheating), just redirect yourself to something positive (relative to that cheat) also known as a treat. Treat yourself for that effort you made to avoid the greater of the two evils. Let’s look below, for example. I’m not going to tell you what’s right or wrong, but I want you to think about what you’re doing a little bit. If you consider the glazed donut taking the high road when the other fork is laden with bricks made of bacon donuts, then you’ve succeeded to some degree.
Obviously, that degree is created by your judgement and thinking process, but this is an exercise in, as we mentioned, redirection and positive thoughts. The difference between the two options could very well be far greater or lesser than that created by a glazed donut with or without bacon. For some, that difference would be significant and for others, that difference would be meaningless. Either way, the choice is always yours and we want you to stop beating yourself up so much over it! Stay hungry and fit!
