When one gives up smoking Camels, drinking Maker’s Mark, snorting coke, and smoking crack all at once at a time in which he has no sex life nor the prospect of one in the near future, he picks up, or returns more vigorously to, lesser vices. Anyone who knows me knows that my appreciation for ice cream is in the same ballpark as my appreciation of cocaine. I like ice creams that have peanut butter or cookies, baked or unbaked, but the ice cream itself, like cocaine, is better when it’s cooked a little. I microwave every bowl I eat at home, and I know exactly how many seconds are optimal for any given quantity. A medium-large bowl, depending on freezer settings and where in the defrost cycle it was when removed, should acquire the perfect soft and creamy consistency with 20 seconds, for example.

So. In addition to the three square meals my attentive and caring mother seems to feel obligated or priviledged to provide, I have satisfied oral fixations and serotonin cravings, soothed stresses and smoothed over sorrows, and substituted the dear departed with rounded mountains of ice cream. The consumptive act itself has been conspicuous to my mother, the results of it conspicuous to others, and it’s becoming clearer to myself and everybody that I’m substituting a food addiction for a drug addiction.

Last night I was hankering for something, and after my first day at the gym, I felt all the more ridiculous about it. Still–just like the million times I felt ridiculous, ugly, pathetic, weak, stupid and so forth about going on a crack run while doing it anyway–I was not to be deterred. Mom keeps a freezer out in the garage to store things she might have bought or prepared in bulk, and not being a frostless model, it makes for a better storage facility for ice cream. But I had to go through her room to get to the garage, and feeling a little sheepish about it, I decided to be coy about it and throw up a weak subterfuge that’s not meant to hide anything but to send the self-effacing message that I’m aware and not proud of my actions. My cuteness would win her complicity and I could go on to lose myself in deliciousness and Modern Marvels on the History channel without a too-brooding sense of guilt. So, dashing out the garage door, I said over my shoulder, “I’ve got to take a little trip.”

The freezer was only 10 feet from the door but before I could get even halfway there, my mom yelled, “David, where’re you going?” Her voice was stern and fearful, and I knew right away what she’d assumed. “Right here,” I said, grabbed a pint of Breyer’s and went back in. “That sounded like panic; did you think I was up to no good?”

“Well, it’s late and you just left. I didn’t know what to think,” she said, which was her way of saying, ‘what else am I supposed to think?’

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to do that to you.”

“Really?”

“Of course. Why would I?”

“Well, you tease me a lot.”

“I guess you’re right about that,” I said. “But I was just embarrassed about getting more ice cream and was trying to be funny.”

I don’t know if you could call that rock-bottom or anything, but it had crossed my mind before that I was just swapping one distraction for another and, in fact, when I had baked and eaten a whole batch of Toll House cookies one night while mom was out somewhere, I felt bad that she came home to the smell but not the taste of fresh baked cookies, but I shrugged and said, “It could have been worse; I could have binged on something else. Mentally, I knew I had to let go of my gooey, sweet security blanket, but I didn’t feel much resolve about putting real limits on it until I tried to goof it over and gave my mom a momentary panic attack instead.

The way I’m going to approach it, though, is not by banning it from my life or setting rules. Rules are very likely to get broken. I’m going to let myself indulge an ice cream fix from time to time but exercise some restraint in frequency and portion sizes. That’s inline with the attitude I’m taking about my health in general. I’m not setting weight-loss goals, but focusing on developing more healthy habits that together will form a more healthy lifestyle.