Last week was an exceptionally emotional one for me. It started out great with that five pound weight loss; however, that triumphant moment was followed quickly by a professional disappointment, then an enormous financial failure. I kept my chin up, though, and focused on good things and solutions. Then, as you know, our dog stopped eating, signaling his approach to the rainbow bridge. Still, I kept moving forward. I got help for the financial crisis. Trey got pain meds and began eating again. I was still moving.

But the coup de grace still awaited – or, rather, the coups de grace (if that can be plural).

Sunday found me accidentally awakening a childhood demon. This event was followed literally minutes later by a real blow when I received an email from a man from my distant past. This man is associated with a particularly difficult time in my life – a watershed time, you could say. My life has since been divided into before him and after him. It wasn’t a bad email; but, it portends another irrevocable change in the life I’ve made. These two things on top of everything else were just too much for me.

My emotional eating triggers started snapping and, honey, it sounded like a shooting gallery in a penny arcade! (Do they even have penny arcades anymore?) Anyway, those triggers were going off left and right! I wanted to strap on a feed bag of puffy Cheetos, go after a gallon of Phish Food with two spoons, then (as I told my friend Jeff) climb into a bottle of cheap Cabernet. (It would have to be a cheap bottle. Good ones are for sipping. Cheap ones are for drowning.) In the end, I did none of those things. If I had, I would still have all those issues to face today, plus I’d have processed food and wine hangovers. I’d have initiated another bout with my sugar addiction AND I’d have the guilt associated with all of those things.

So, in the end, I had some veggies with hummus and a little ranch dip, some fruit, a little Margherita pizza, some chips and corn salsa, a vegetarian corn dog (hot dogs are a Super Bowl tradition for me), and a little salted caramel Dream gelato while I watched Pete Carroll blow the game. I drank one Mike’s Hard Lemonade and did not count my calories for the day. Well, I didn’t count them yesterday. I counted them just now. Ouch.

For the day, I ate just under 2200 calories. With the little bit of exercise I performed, my net for the day was just under 2000. It wasn’t a gawd awful day, but my daily calorie budget right now is 1317. Sooooohoho…….I blew that up. Do I feel guilty this morning?

Nope. Not even a little bit.

In the face of what I wanted to do and what I would have done four years or even four months ago, I restrained myself yesterday and I count it a victory. For sure I felt like a shooting gallery duck but, that’s okay because you know the great thing about those little guys?

When they get to the end of the line, they get right back up again and make another pass.