Indulgence

When I think of the word "indulgence" I tend to think of people gorging themselves on sweets. And then I like to think of myself as immune to such a thing, simply because I don't much care for sweets.

Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy the occasional slice of cake, but I really don't care for the icing on top. When it comes to ice cream, I'm a strict vanilla type of guy. And don't get me started on chocolate. I can't stand the stuff, and have pretty much disliked it since the early teen years. But even before that, chocolate was ingested sparingly.

The truth is, I'm not immune to indulging myself when it comes to certain foods. While I may stay, for the most part, away from sweet items, I have had to retrain my thinking when it comes to certain foods.

Let's take pizza for an example. Back in college, I would think nothing of calling my old friend Papa John and ordering a large pizza all for myself. And I would polish it off in one evening. That was then. That was when I had an actual metabolism that would burn of insane quantities of food in short amounts of time. And really, that metabolism didn't last long. In the later college years, those pizzas caught up to me a bit.

These days, I still love a good pizza. And though I can't just sit down and eat an entire pie without feeling incredibly sick, I can still do half a large if I don't stop to think about what I'm doing. It's easy to overindulge if we're not paying attention. Because while we're still eating, our stomach may still be sending the signal that we're hungry, but that's because the food that we've already eaten hasn't gotten there yet. And then, when we finally do start to feel full, we're still busy shoving food into our mouths. And then it's too late. The overindulgence has begun.

So, staying with the pizza example, I still have the occasion to order myself a pizza. In fact, I'm pretty sure I could eat pizza for every meal, I like it that much. But I've learned my limitations. Two slices, then stop. Unless, of course, I just happen to feel like indulging myself.