Today I did something I find very difficult.  I wrote code.  I spent five hours sitting at my desk, trying to brute-force 15 measly lines of code to do my bidding.¹

I’m not a good coder.  I’m so horrible that I have romantic fantasies about dating a guy who codes, and who loves me enough to write my 15 lines of JavaScript on his lunch break.  I’m so horrible that I have to show up at work an hour early so I can think while it’s still quiet, and once my boisterous office-mates arrive, headphones and white noise become my fashion accessory of the day.  Writing code is not easy!  And writing code once or twice a year doesn’t do much improve your skills, let me tell you.

So I wrote code, I was successful and I did a happy dance.  Later, at lunch, I sabotaged my Number One Life Priority — my diet lifestyle change.  I drove through Fazoil’s and ate a double slide of pepperoni pizza, two breadsticks, and a Dr. Pepper.

WHY????????  What happened?  What knocked me off the wagon this time?

After kicking myself all afternoon I read a fantastic article on Lifehacker that may have the answer.  It’s possible our mental reserves for willpower and cognitive effort are located in the same place.  So when I’ve spent five hours concentrating, researching, thinking, and feeling like a failure (It’s 15 freaking lines of code!) it’s possible I’ve depleted the cognition/willpower well.  After all that mental effort it may be very hard for me to decide on a healthy dining choice, and even harder for me to avoid my old fat-filled fallbacks.

My takeaway from this experience is that I need to avoid going to work without a lunch bag.  If I’ve made the decision in the morning, when I have plenty of willpower, then I’m not leaving myself room to make bad decisions at lunch.

I’ve been very focused on dinner lately, due to the subscription boxes, but it’s time to regroup and focus on the other 2/3s of my daily caloric intake.

¹In case you’re interested, I managed to export a Unicode CSV file from Google Sheets, then import the file into Articulate Storyline, where I used a JavaScript library to parse it and save the data into Storyline variables.  It worked!  Go me!