I’m No Quitter

Happy New Year all! Hope you had the chance for a lovely break at the end of the year.

I should be telling you my 16 goals in 2016. I should probably have told you them on the first day of the year. (I’m no good at January.)

Instead, I’m going to answer today’s Daily Prompt:

Tell us about something you’ve tried to quit. Did you go cold turkey, or for gradual change? Did it stick?

My name is Lauren, and I am a chocoholic. Apparently chocolate is not technically addictive, but I would sometimes be interested in admitting to a doctor the amount of chocolate I eat to see if they could tell me what’s wrong.

Mmm, Malteser cake.

Seriously poor willpower, you might say, but in some ways my self-discipline is strong. I’m not really the quitting type. When I was seventeen, I got a job for a retail giant I was super keen to work for. After one week, I hated everything about it and decided I should find something else. And yet, despite crying the night before shifts for at least two months, I worked there for three years. The only reason I left was because I was moving to France, and it would have been a hell of a commute.

So I can stick with things I don’t like, as well as things I do. One of my favourite hobbies when I was a teenager (up to my twenties, in fact) was playing the keyboard. At first, though, I didn’t always relish the thought of classes; then, when it started to get a bit more difficult, I enjoyed it. Lots of people quit playing the instruments they learn as a kid, but I took my hobby to two university diplomas, and only stopped attending classes when I (again) was moving to France.

The same went for Guiding. How many of you were Rainbows and Brownies? And how many of you were Guides as teenagers, when there were ‘cooler’ things to be doing? Me, I did the Baden-Powell Award, the highest award a Guide can achieve, then I was a Young Leader for two years during university. I only stopped because (you’ve guessed it by now) I was moving to France.

I make an excellent brownie.

Anyway, I was talking about chocolate. I know this isn’t as bad (or doesn’t immediately sound as bad) as being addicted to smoking or alcohol or drugs. Yet, even when I joke about the fact that I ‘need’ chocolate because I’ve only had one Twirl by lunch time, I do worry about the impact it’s having on my health. A high-sugar intake increases your risk of so many illnesses that we should take a poor diet more seriously.

Anyway, I decided to give up chocolate in my fourth year of uni, not for health reasons at this stage, but to see if I could. This was when I was studying for final exams. Yeah, this was never going to work. I swapped it for doughnuts: another food high in sugar and no better for you. I didn’t eat chocolate for six days (unprecedented). After those six days and – no joke – gaining weight due to the amount of doughnuts I was eating to fill the chocolate void, I decided that I would be as well eating the junk food I’m actually craving. In the five years since, there have probably been fewer than ten days in which I’ve had no chocolate at all.

(I know one goal for this year: try to get chocolate consumption back to the level of your average human.)

So I’m no quitter (even if sometimes it’s to my own detriment). That’s why I like to set goals, and why I often achieve them.

My main problem? Getting started…!