The Cookie Athlete
I’m a Cookie Athlete, which directly translated means, I workout so I can eat cookies. I can pin point the day I became a true Cookie Athlete. It started with a contract, a skinny girl, and an empty pie shell.
I had this brilliant idea to completely cut sugar from my diet for about seven months (September 1st through Easter). The idea was to kill all desire for the stuff and make the holidays less temptatious. For some reason, I was only able to wrangle one person into committing to delete sugar from life—enter the skinny girl, Susie.
Next I wrote a no-sugar contract.
This thing was very detailed. We had caveats like, we could eat a piece of pie on Thanksgiving and we could have ice cream on our birthdays—because you know, going completely off of sugar would just be crazy, right?
We built in a couple other cheats. Our home canned fruit was okay, as was natural maple syrup on pancakes. A drop of honey in our tea was permissible too. Everything was set.
We printed out the contract, signed it, and thus the healthy living began. Before long we would be buying extra-small jeans and doing century rides every weekends, all the while munching on barley and kale—or something like that.
It actually started okay.
All my clothes got looser. Susie was experimenting with recipes and delivering healthy incarnations of treats to my door almost daily. We were biking up a storm.
And then we snapped.
On a Thursday afternoon we stopped our bikes on the banks of a brook to talk. Sugar confession after sugar confession started surfacing, and we realized the sugar diet was a bust.
My husband and I had been watching “Pushing Daisies” which ought to be called, “The Pie Pusher”. Looking at those glorious pies in every episode was torture. In desperation I baked a gorgeous little pie shell and ate the whole flippin’ thing with a bowl of canned peaches and whipped cream.
Check it out the stats in this scenario.
(And you thought you’d never use math skills in real life.) I actually ate the following food.
1 small-ish pie shell = 600 calories
1 cup of canned peaches = 100 calories
6 T of whipped cream = 300 calories
Total: 1000 calories
However, my favorite peach pie recipe only has 250 calories per slice, and tastes much better than the makeshift peach pie concoction. Plus, one slice will suffice. A 30-minute run (even at a pace of just 12-minute miles) burns about 500 calories.
We never did officially call it quits.
At Thanksgiving I made nine pies and enjoyed a generous amount (That was one of the caveats after all.) We pilfered our kids’ holiday candy stashes while they slept. We ate cookies and ice cream, and broke every rule we set on paper. But my favorite story was the day Susie made lemon bars.
It was one of those terrible, awful, no good, very bad days. The car broke, the trash can tipped over, the kids wouldn’t nap, someone got tar on the hardwood floor, etc, etc. etc. Naturally she turned to sweets.
But you just can’t eat one lemon bar when the rest of the family knows you’re on a sugar strike. So like any sane adult—she ate the whole batch in order to destroy the evidence.
The months dragged on.
We never really got back on the wagon. Then finally the contract was over.
The day it ended I called Susie and we both laughed because we knew that lousy contract hadn’t meant a thing since that day by the brook when we figured out we were Cookie Athletes.
The moral of the story is…never swear off sugar. It’s easier to run three miles than go without chocolate chip cookies.
Cookie athlete is a legitimate lifestyle.
Yesterday I burned 900 calories on a long uphill bike ride and then I had two peanut butter cookies for just 280 calories total. As much as I hate clichés I’m gonna say it…Cookie Athlete is win-win!
Look at all the ways a Cookie Athlete can enjoy treats, and then turn around and workout.
Fudge Cookies cost 170 calories each. 30-minute swim burns 400 calories
Crème Brûlée costs 400 calories. 2-hour hike burns 1200 calories.
Mint Ice cream Bar costs 300 calories. Tennis (singles) burns 800 calories per hour.
Join the Cookie Athlete movement and burn it to earn it! We’re on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest too.