The Doughnut Situation
A four-finger KitKat surviving three days on my desk, then my wife puts a bag of yellow-label custard doughnuts and a cup of tea right next to me. This wasn't a clean win. It was a genuine fight, and I very nearly lost it.
There’s a four-finger KitKat that’s been sitting on my desk for three days.
I haven’t eaten it. I’ve wanted to eat it, repeatedly, but I haven’t.
Then this evening my wife put a bag of custard doughnuts down next to me. With a cup of tea. Unprompted.
That’s not a snack. That’s an ambush.
They were yellow label. Reduced, nearing the end of their shelf life, which is its own specific kind of pressure entirely separate from wanting one.
That’s not just “do I fancy a doughnut.” That’s the sunk-cost argument arriving in its purest form: paid for, sitting right there, and genuinely going to be binned if nobody eats them soon. I hate wasting food. I hate wasting money on food even more. Those two things together have talked me into finishing plenty of things over the years that I didn’t actually want, long before Mounjaro was ever part of the conversation.
So this wasn’t some token gesture of willpower. It was a proper fight, on two fronts at once — want the doughnut, and don’t-waste-it on top of that — and for a while I genuinely didn’t know which way it was going to go.
Tea, sugar, fat, custard, and availability, all arriving at once while I wasn’t physically hungry in the slightest. My stomach was perfectly comfortable. My brain had other ideas entirely, and it had reinforcements.
I sat there and made myself say it properly, out loud in my head, because I needed to actually hear it rather than just feel it:
I want it. I don’t need it.
That sentence is a lot harder to hold onto in the moment than it looks written down.
For context, the day so far had been cornflakes mid-morning, then a roast duck dinner — duck thigh, caramelised apple sauce, potatoes, green beans. Somewhere around 900 to 1,250 calories depending on how generous the portions actually were. A doughnut on top of that wasn’t going to wreck anything. That was never really the question.
The actual question was whether I wanted the calories enough to spend them on something that had just appeared next to me because it looked good, was about to go off, and I don’t need it.
I survived the doughnut situation. Barely, if I’m honest.
Wanted it. Didn’t need it. Didn’t eat it.
And the KitKat is still sitting there. Three days now. It’s not in the fridge where I could claim I simply wasn’t thinking about it — it’s right there on the desk, in view, every time I look up.
This one, I will call willpower. Properly earned, not a foregone conclusion, and closer than I’d like to admit.
I’m not going to pretend this is some permanent state I’ve reached. If I eat the KitKat tomorrow, or the next bag of reduced doughnuts that turns up next to my tea, none of what happened today gets undone.
The win isn’t a number of days.
It’s noticing, each time — even when it’s a genuine fight — that the decision was actually mine to make.
I’m going to bed shortly, and I already know what I’ll be thinking about: that bag on the side, and the doughnut in it slowly going stale. That’s not victory. That’s just where the fight actually ended up.