Go back to Notes from a Radical Behaviorist

 

Dick's Day: A Day of Degeneracy
Richard W. Malott1

Behavior Analysis Program
Department of Psychology
Western Michigan University

 

Saturday, April 22, 2006 6:19 AM

Peggy:

I’m taking the liberty of sharing this email with a few hundred close friends because it’s so morally instructive.

After our Departmental Honors Thesis Orals, I had only two small, silver-dollar-sized scones (which I chose to classify as non-desserts) and announced that I would abstain from any of the other tempting pastries.  

Then I asked Kendra to take the still-full tray of pastries from the BATS lab when she left at 5 PM, because I’d be staying for a while longer and needed to put Satan behind me. Also, I contracted to pay her personally $20, if I had anything else from the tray.  

And that worked well—I stayed clean. 

But about 5:30 PM I had one of the half-dozen commercial cookies I’d noticed in the BATS Lab fridge. Cheap, gaudy, but delicious. So I had one more. (These were not part of my $20  performance-management contract with Kendra, but I’d decided to kill the whole bag of cookies and pay my customary $20 penalty to the BATS Lab fund.)  

But then I had the good judgment to check out the nutritional info—170 calories, 7 grams of  fat, 1 gram of fiber. I panicked and ran to my WeightWatchers’ point calculator. One of those very-medium-sized cookies was 4 WeightWatchers points! Interesting what a chilling effect that info had on me. If I hadn’t seen that, I’d have finished off the pack of cookies. But armed with the WeightWatchers info, I wisely once again, put Satan behind me by self-righteously grabbing the bag of remaining cookies and taking them to the trash container out in the hall. But on the way, I grabbed one more cookie for just one more bite, but ended gobbling down that third cookie before reaching the trash container. 

Then I went back to my laptop in the BATS Lab to knock off a couple hours of writing and thereby get a little closer to my weekly writing quota, on which I was seven hours behind; but instead I spent the two hours answering email—important work, but not my official writing. 

At 8 PM, I packed my laptop to head home. But in a familiar moment of weakness, I decided to go to the trash container and fish out one more cookie, one for the road. (Incidentally, I’d emptied the cookies from their package directly into the trash container so they would not be staying in their hygienic package and thereby tempt me. But maybe one would be on top of one of the others and thereby still hygienic, or maybe they would just be lying on some hygienic notepaper someone else had tossed in the container before me.) However, when I pulled the lid off the trash container, it was empty. The custodian had already emptied the containers for the day.

Week 4-17-2006              
Day
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thur
Fri
Sat
Sun
Weight
146
144
146
145
145
145
Allowed Points
30
35
34
35
34
35
36
Actual Points
30
60
34
43.5
34

Love,

Uncle Dickie


Week 3-06-2006              
Day
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thur
Fri
Sat
Sun
Weight
145.5
144.5
144
144.5
144.5
144.5
144.5
Allowed Points
27
29
27
29
27
29
31
Actual Points
27
29
27
29
27
27
31

 

Week 3-13-2006              
Day
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thur
Fri
Sat
Sun
Weight
146.5
145
145
145
145.5
147
147.5
Allowed Points
30
31
29
31
29
29
25
Actual Points
30
31
29
31
49.5
57
25

 

Week 3-20-2006              
Day
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thur
Fri
Sat
Sun
Weight
146
144.5
144.5
?
?
153
148
Allowed Points
21
31
30
20
20
25
27
Actual Points
21
31
119
91
98
25
25

 

Week 3-27-2006              
Day
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thur
Fri
Sat
Sun
Weight
146
144.5
146
144
145
143.5
142.5
Allowed Points
24
31
24
31
30
31
31
Actual Points
24
40
23
31
30
31
31

 

Week 4-10-2006              
Day
Mon
Tue
Wed
Thur
Fri
Sat
Sun
Weight
145
143
144.5
145.6
144
148.5
145
Allowed Points
35
35+
35+
36
35
36
30
Actual Points
35?
65?
43.5
35
50
35
32

Comments:

From: Wade Hitzing
Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2006 5:33 PM
To: DickMalott@old.dickmalott.com
Subject: cookies and your newfound self-control

Your story about the cookies reminded me of the following. Sandy and Julia (she must have been about 5 or 6) had just come home from grocery shopping. As I watched Julia helping put up the groceries, I noticed her put the bag of Oreos in a pot, put the lid on the pot and place it in the back of the pot drawer. I asked why, she said "Dick, he is always eating my cookies". I do believe that you had come over the week before and managed to polish off almost an entire bag. I'm glad to see that some of Whaley finally rubbed off on you.

Best
Wade