Oh Walgreens, You Temptress

I'm sad to say that I have been avoiding places like Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid for 5 weeks.  They honestly scare me.  For years, I have been giving myself excuses for why I need to enter one of these stores so I could go in and buy some kind of candy.  The holiday seasons are the worst.  And I'm not talking Thanksgiving through Christmas, I'm talking Halloween through Easter.  The time when the various 'Reese's Eggs' shapes are out.  It used to be that we would only get those big ol' gobs of extra Reese's Peanut Butter Cups at Easter.  Hence the name "Reese's Eggs".  But the geniuses at Reese's realized that they can make those addictive little guys in the shapes of Pumpkins! Christmas trees! Hearts!  So now they are available 6 months out of the year!  Hurrah!

Needless to say, I have wanted to avoid them since my time at Green Mountain.  Given that it was a week after Easter and to be honest, those things aren't as good stale, I decided it was time to enter a Walgreens.  I had to go get a prescription and we were almost out of toilet paper in our apartment.  I used the nice, sunny day as an excuse to walk the few blocks.  Once I entered the store, I mindlessly took the candy aisle to get to the back of the store.  Bad idea.  While I didn't see any Reese's Eggs calling out to me, I did see Ghirardelli Caramel Filled Milk Chocolate Squares...another chocolate vice.  I picked up the bag that contains like 10-12 delicious squares and turned it over to look at the ingredients.

Surely my high-end chocolate wouldn't deceive me.  It has to be all natural ingredients, right?  Wrong.  The first few words that popped out at me were Corn Syrup, Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Hydrogenated Coconut and Soybean Oils, Sorbitol, Artificial Flavoring....the list went on and on.  "Well, I thought to myself....the squares are individually wrapped.  So if I bring this bag home, I could just have like one a day..."  So I picked up the bag and continued to the back of the store to pick up my toilet paper and then I hopped in line at the pharmacy.  Thank goodness the pharmacy line was long and slow.  While in line, I was surrounded by all kinds of medicines and not too healthy looking people.  I looked closely at some of the people around me and just noticed how tired they all looked.  Then I looked back at the chocolate in my hand and I started to remember what I feel like when I come down hard from a sugar crash.  I remembered getting chocolate from Walgreens the last time I was there before my GM month. I brought it home, ate it, and then I didn't not have the energy to move from the couch the rest of the day.

So I decided to bid farewell to the chocolate and put it back.  Unfortunately, I didn't want to lose my place in line, so I sneakily put the bag on a shelf among some allergy medication and then looked up at the surveillance camera and saw myself doing the sneaky move.  I half excepted the Walgreens manager to seek me out and force me to buy the chocolate since I didn't put it back where it belonged, but thankfully he didn't.

I got my two things I needed, left, and walked home, forgetting all about the chocolate squares.  I decided to have some of my Chocolate Zucchini Bread I bought from Foodcopia when I got home instead and felt great after I had it with some strawberries.

Success!