It was almost a couple of weeks into the new year and like many others, I had set some lofty goals for the year. Some goals were simple like not using my phone until an hour after I woke up, while some will require a good amount of effort like finally dunking. However, there was a habit I knew would be the hardest, limiting myself to one bag of limon Lay’s chips.
Growing up a picky eater I didn’t do any exploration when it came to food. Everything I liked was either made by my mom or original flavor. But one day I had some of the limon flavored Lay’s chips and my world would be changed forever. I became addicted and til this day I could easily destroy a bag within a sitting. It seemed harmless given my good health, but then we ran some numbers.
Given my consumption of these chips, I’d roughly be eating 100 gallons of sunflower oil each year (about the size of a small bag with 17 chips per day), just from these chips! Something had to change.
This is where my decision to eat a bag a month came into play. However, I still needed to find a solution to make each precious bag last a bit longer. As satisfying as eating an entire bag (about the size of eight small bags) in one sitting was, not having one of my favorite snacks for another 30 days was going to be rough. Time to rethink the scope of this goal.
Although I’m grateful for having a job opportunity after I finish this program, I knew that I still had to stay prepared for interviews just in case. And given that my leetcode skills were rusty, to say the least, my fiancee found a perfect solution. She purposed that in order for me eat a serving of chips, I’d have to complete (or do 30 minutes worth of trying) two leetcode problems.
Still under a month since I have done this method, but I’d say things are going pretty well. I’ve done over ten leetcode medium problems and got rewarded with my favorite chips! This has been one of my favorite ways to reframe any habits that I may want to kick in order to build habits that can help create the life that I want.
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