You’re headed to the store for your weekly grocery shopping trip, list meticulously written out for all the ingredients you need for meal prepping for the upcoming week. You even have a couple of cheat items on the list so you don’t feel like you’re depriving yourself. This meal prepping thing you’ve been doing this past month has been doing wonders for your budget and for reducing your tendency to impulsively buy fast food every night. You haven’t weighed yourself since you started, but it’s even possible you might have lost some weight, you muse.

Your route to the store takes you right past the local mom-and-pop fried chicken joint. They have the BEST chicken around. Your weakness. You can practically feel the crunch of the crispy breaded skin in your mouth. Before you know it, your car finds its way into the drive-thru line as if drawn by a magnet. You don’t even glance at the faded menu board, which you know by heart. You give your order through the crackly speaker: the 8 piece family meal, which comes with 8 pieces of chicken and four biscuits. You ask for all drumsticks, with mac and cheese as the side and a large Coke to drink. The bag they hand you through the drive-thru window has a familiar heaviness to it. You take the first gulp of Coke as you drive away.

A few minutes later, you pull into the grocery store parking lot, find a spot near the back, and tear into the bag, moaning quietly as your teeth sink into the first crunchy, greasy drumstick. The breading shatters satisfyingly, giving way to tender, succulent meat beneath. The drumstick disappears quickly, and you grab another, eating it about halfway before searching out the first of four fluffy, buttery biscuits and another slurp of Coke. The rest of the drumstick follows the biscuit in short order, and you reach for the third drumstick, savoring the crunchy bites as you fumble the plasticware out of its wrapper so you can get into the mac and cheese. It is cheesy perfection, and you moan again as you bolt it right out of the serving tray.

Bite by greedy bite, the drumsticks, the biscuits, the mac and cheese, and the Coke all disappear into your stomach. Grease glistens on your lips and fingers. Crumbs and drips speckle your shirt. You feel dazed, almost sick as the effects of your meal catch up to you. A belch relieves some of the pressure in your stomach, which feels like a lead balloon has expanded inside it. You moan again, this time from the discomfort of being so stuffed, along with the simultaneous pleasure it brings you.

You lean back in your seat and rub your stomach up and down, trying to get a bit more comfortable as the meal really hits you now. Your hand bumps against the steering wheel, and looking down, you see how close your stomach is to it. Damn. When did you get so fat? You weren’t supposed to be doing this anymore.

The grocery store entrance seems impossibly far away in your stuffed state. You start the car and move it to a closer spot. In the new spot, you sit a while longer, waiting for your meal to settle enough that the idea of walking through the entire store feels tolerable.

They say shopping on a full stomach helps reduce impulse buying, so theoretically this should be the perfect time to get your groceries. 

Surely you’ll stick to your list. Right?

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