I’ve been working at a customer’s site for the last few weeks and have been struggling to resist their buffet of free junk food. They have a fridge stocked with iced-tea and sodas as well as baskets full of cookies, candy, rice crispy treats, chips, and similar foods. Over the weekend I was thinking back to the extra ~ 3000 calories I probably ate from the “basket of temptation” the week before and wondering what strategy I could use to help fight the impulse to snack all the time.

The Solution

One of my friends has a system where, if you catch him doing some “self-identified bad behavior” (coming into work late, cursing, bad food choices,etc), he will often give you $1 (although he weasels out about 25% of the time which makes people less likely to call him on it). I thought I’d do a similar system for the snacking, but would up the penalty to something that is more painful. I decided to make it $5 a snack. The next piece was deciding whether to offer it as a bounty for my friends or just handle the accounting internally. I chose to keep my own tally, since it would be pretty clear to me if I had a snack or not, and I didn’t want to drag my friends into watching me or get an urge to sneak in a cookie when nobody was around. The next question was what to do with the penalty amount if I broke down. I first thought I’d give it to a charity I like, such as the Humane Society. But I realized that would allow me to justify snacking with the whole “well, it is going to a good cause” line of thinking. A friend of mine then came up with an excellent suggestion; pick a charity I really disliked. The thought of donating money to a charity whose mission is getting the biblical creation story intelligent design “theory” taught in public school science classrooms as an equivalent to evolution really annoys me.

The Result

The plan worked like a charm. I didn’t have a single cookie or snack all week. Even the aroma wafting from a tray of just-out-of-the-oven chocolate chip cookies at the hotel I was staying at was not strong enough to overcome my resolve.