We were at Rehoboth Beach over Memorial Day Weekend. It’s my favorite beach town on the east coast. There’s a boardwalk, rides, and appropriately unhealthy beach foods. My family loves it there. On a warm night after everyone has walked around, crashed their bumper cars like vengeful NASCAR drivers and ridden The Sea Witch (back row only) one too many times, my kids love to get ice cream.
On this particular night my son had gone back to where we were staying already. So my daughter and I went to get ice cream without him. Even though he didn’t ask me, I decided to get my son a scoop of chocolate on a cone to surprise him. So I paid up, took the dripping cone, gently placed it in a cup, stuck a spoon into the melting ice cream and we started our way home. My daughter smiled and proceeded to devour her cone, waxing on about the deliciousness, a cross between Hemingway, Julia Childs and Dick Vitale. I held my son’s ice cream in front of me, as my daughter continued her detailed descriptions of the sweet, cool, creamy concoction. I walked step after step, through the warm evening air, swimming in the sounds of the beach with that red plastic spoon handle tilted toward me. Seemingly moving closer and closer to my hand as the ice cream swooned and softened.
The Ice Cream made it to my son untouched. Actually, I was never even tempted. I had already eaten a great piece of fish with perfectly charred asparagus on the side. I had no desire for the ice cream. Zero. Seriously. For those of you who have never eaten paleo/primal/ancestral/whole you may not believe this, but you do reach that point. You don’t want to eat pizza and fries and ice cream. It’s no longer a feeling of depriving yourself. You just don’t want it. When you hit that point you’ve got a really good chance of sticking with your program.