I wish there was something or someone that I could blame it on. Genes surely play a role. My family happens to be active producers and consumers in the sport of BAKING and EATING. We all bake and we all eat what we bake.  My specialty happens to be cookies.

My baking experience began way back with a little green contraption called the Easy Bake Oven.  It was a little bitty faux appliance from which one could produce little bitty cakes from little bitty cake mix.  The heating element was a light bulb and I suppose it was fairly safe for its time. After one too many experiments with flour and sugar in the Easy Bake mama finally caved and let me bake my first batch of cookies, sugar cookies at around 7 or 8 years old. That was the moment that Cookie Monster Thorns was born.

For 40 years I don’t recall going a month without baking cookies or a week without eating them which is not necessarily a good thing for someone who: a)has struggled with weight issues most of her life and ; b)someone who was diagnosed with Type II diabetes in 2004.  Neither of these issues stopped me from my cookie baking or eating in fact rebelliousness and denial led me to do it more, until a series of events got me “scared straight”, sort of.

I still eat and bake cookies, just not like I used to my health was suffering and I was under orders to lose weight which I did.  However, I’m a realist and know my body.  Flat out cold turkey cookie quitting didn’t work.  Every time I tried it, it ended in some sort of cookie coma in which I’d end up begging God to let me live with the promise of never doing it again.  So I stopped doing it, going overboard that is.  If I want the cookie(s) I eat them and move on — no self-bashing, no belly aches and no promises to God to not do it again.  Don’t get me wrong, if I let cookies (and a few other things) go completely, I’d probably fit nicely on the BMI charts by now but I’m not there.  In the meantime I’ll eat as well as I can, workout and have a cookie as needed.

What about you? Are you a cookie monster?  What is that thing that you enjoy so much that you won’t refrain from it even if it doing so can improve your health and fitness?  I’d love to hear about it.  Let me know in the comments on Google+ or Twitter.

Until next time, see you in the kitchen, where I’ll be preparing a lovely salad with cookies for dessert :-).

Photos: Easy Bake Oven Wikimedia Commons user Rdmsf; all others MsThorns