Two years in and the pastry case still talks to me

Tbh I’d push back on the pastry case being the main villain. My spreadsheet says my surprise bites cluster by location, not food type. Last 90 days: 68% happened at the sink/counter during cleanup, only 14% at the actual dessert shelf. The trigger was transition, not croissants. Your quarter-teaspoon taste is a good pause, but have you logged where you are when it happens? If Tuesday was at the sink, maybe the rule is “no bites while the water runs,” not “avoid the case.” I’m two years in too, and my

The quarter-teaspoon taste is good harm-reduction, but it only covers deliberate tasting. The three-cookie episode sounds like automaticity—same location, same motor sequence, no conscious decision. I had the same with broken cookies during close. What helped: day-old product went into opaque bins before the dinner rush, and the sink became a no-food zone. If I wanted to taste, I had to walk it to the office and sit. Friction killed most of it. I also logged “standing bites” as a separate category for two weeks; data showed 90% clustered during cleanup, not service. Have you mapped when/where yours happen? The pastry case may be less the issue than the closing routine.

Tbh the "barely clocked it until the third one" bit is what gets me. There was a thread here a while back about the difference between choosing a pastry and a pastry choosing you, and the tell was always the same: no plate, no sitting down. Sink-standing is the giveaway.

One concrete thing that helped me with day-olds specifically — they're not inventory anymore, so my brain files them under cleanup instead of eating. I started logging them like a real sale. Sounds ridiculous, but seeing "3 almond cookies, 4pm, standing" in a row for a week was sobering.

Was Tuesday after the lunch rush wound down? That dead twenty minutes before close is my danger window, and I'm curious if cafe people all share the same one.

Curious whether you’ve tracked the when rather than the what. I kept a note on my phone for two weeks: time, hunger 1–10, what I ate before. My “random” grabs clustered at 3pm on days I skipped lunch, and almost never after a real lunch with protein/fat. The pastry was just the nearest available thing. Might be worth logging your pre-cookie hunger and the last time you ate. If it’s not hunger, then it’s probably habit/transition—coming in from the front, closing out the till, etc. What’s the trigger right before the first bite?

One thing I track that helped: not just what I eat, but where I eat it. My log has a “standing/not plated” flag. Since January, unplanned bites at the sink/counter averaged 5.5/week; bites eaten from a plate averaged 0.8/week. The trigger for me is usually the 15-minute lull, not the pastry case. So I keep a tiny saucer by the sink. If it’s worth eating, it goes on the saucer and gets logged before bite one. Sounds fussy, but it turned three day-old cookies into one because I had to decide first. Do you track “day-old/free” stuff as its

The sink detail got me — at home it's the counter by the fridge, eating my kids' crusts and half a granola bar while unloading the dishwasher, zero memory of enjoying any of it. What helped was making the autopilot eat visible: anything I eat standing up goes on a napkin I have to look at. Seeing three wrappers piled there hits different than tossing them in the bin as I go. Curious though — are the cookies hitting during a lull, or mid-rush? Mine are almost always lull plus hands needing a job, which for me was a totally different fix than actual hunger.

I’m an empty-nester too, and my autopilot eating was always tied to a transition—walking in the door, finishing a task, standing at the counter. What helped was making the kitchen less of a hallway: I put a chair and a glass of water by the sink and told myself if I want a cookie I have to sit down with it. Sitting made the third one impossible to ignore. Does yours hit at a specific time, like after the lunch rush or right before close? If it’s the same window, maybe a short walk or a real snack at that point changes the script.