Even Dietitians Break Their Own Rules

Chocolate for breakfast, drinking before five—my rules are good guidelines, but they're not law
by Frances Largeman-Roth, RD

Like many responsible adults, I follow lots of rules. Some are for safety—look both ways before crossing the street; don’t leave perishable food out for more than two hours. Others are my own self-imposed, because-it’s-healthy-for-me and I-want-to-set-a-good-example limitations. These rules include the following.

No snacking after dinner, unless it’s a piece of fruit.
Always select the whole-grain choice.
Chocolate is best rationed out into small, sinful desserts.
No coffee after 11 a.m.
Don’t drink alone before 5 p.m.
There are others, but I won’t bore you. I highlight these because I broke them all on a recent work trip to New York City.

I’m always thrilled with the small groceries in New York, which are filled with the kinds of foods that I have to search high and low for in Birmingham. I bought a bar of marzipan, that continental almond-paste confection, covered in dark chocolate. The first night I was there, I sliced off a morsel and enjoyed the combination of bittersweet chocolate and thick and nutty marzipan. I went to bed satisfied.

The second night, after schlepping around for hours in Chelsea and eating a fairly healthy Vietnamese dinner, I returned to my hotel room exhausted. I sliced off another piece of the marzipan. And then another. Soon I said screw it and ate the rest of the bar, thereby breaking rule #1. I wouldn’t feel so badly about that if I hadn’t started the following morning with chocolate waffles filled with a creamy layer of peanut butter at Norma’s. This was not a whole-grain breakfast option, nor was it in keeping with my law of chocolate being a dessert item. Goodbye rules #2 and #3.

And because my neighbors at the hotel were loudmouths with a tendency to slam doors, my sleep had been delayed and disrupted. This gave me the perfect excuse to break rule #4 on each day of my trip. Perhaps it was my new devil-may-care attitude that allowed me to throw rule #5 to the wind as well. It was scarcely 4 p.m. when I ordered a glass of Prosecco sparkling wine at the hotel bar, but I rationalized that I had only been to one holiday party this year and therefore hadn’t been overly boozing it.

OK, so I broke five of my rules. They’re good guidelines and by sticking to them I can have a few glasses of wine each week and not fret too much about dinners out. But no one got hurt due to my lapse in willpower, and (shocker!) I didn’t gain five pounds. This all goes to show that you don’t need to be good all the time, just most of the time.