Prompt 21 – Embrace: We all have guilty pleasures – long baths, Shakira, Pabst, the Kardashians – and we can spend time and energy fighting and hiding them. Until we get tired of fighting them. And then we either stop endulging or we embrace them. What guilty pleasure have you embraced this year? What have you just accepted as something you enjoy and stopped denying it? What do you enjoy that would surprise people that know you? If you’re still fighting your guilty pleasure, tell us what it is. Come clean. You’ll feel a lot better.

There are two guilty pleasures–sweets and reality junk TV–that rot different parts of my body for essentially the same reason: because what’s bad for you usually is what gives you the most enjoyment.

I don’t know how much of an explanation I need to give these two guilty pleasures, especially to those who are with me on this. Simply put, we all love what we know is bad for us. Sweets, as they are widely known, aren’t good for our bodies or for our health, and I’ve already blogged about my obsession with sugar. I wish I were one of the “chosen ones” who didn’t care for sweets, but alas, this is my kryptonite. I have embraced this fact in the sense that I’m aware of it and I continue to succumb to it. But I simultaneously reject it in that I’d like to get to the point in curbing my cravings where sugar is not something I crave anymore. But until then, sweets remain a pleasure that, for me, really is laden with guilt.

The other guilty pleasure, reality junk TV, is something a lot of people hate to admit they indulge in, and I am one of those people. I know how awful these shows are, how petty watching other people’s drama play out on TV is, how insignificant and rather demeaning the whole kit and kaboodle is, how I shouldn’t be encouraging such an industry to exist by reading rag mags or contributing to the Neilsen ratings of said shows…but I can’t help it. At the end of a long, tiring day, sometimes you want a different kind of junk food for your mind. Admittedly, it’s this kind of numbing effect that the mainstream media has mastered, but in this case, I want the numbness. I don’t want to think about anything important or life threatening or deep. I want to stare aimlessly at the ridiculousness playing out before me and realize I’m doing A-OK.

Guilty pleasures serve a purpose of allowing some indulgence in your life. And indulgence can be well served as a treat for hard work. I suppose the only time guilty pleasures can be unhealthy is when you over indulge in them. I’m not the religious type, but isn’t over indulgence a rather gluttonous–seven deadly–sin? So, perhaps I could stand to take these two pleasures down a notch and start to alleviate the guilt that has come along with them and get back more to enjoying the occasional enjoyment of it all.