Step No. 4 - Eat your dessert before vegetables

"Gosh, Ma - It's swell that you care for my health and all,
but did you have to put the broccoli in the cake?"

Part of this is purely out of spite because I'm an adult and can do this without reproach. It's clear that parents use dessert as incentive for children to finish their vegetables; the vegetables that kids don't want to eat because they were prepared so horribly by Mom, Dad, or a canned-food factory worker in Mississauga. Is there any wonder why people want to eat dessert and skip the veggies altogether? Of course not!

One of the many simple joys of adulthood is having one's dessert in the middle of the afternoon or right before dinner time. Adding coffee or tea, and the pleasure of a friend's company changes the equation. In this respect, the act of adolescent defiance is recontextualised as a defensible act of socialisation, networking, or professional congress.
In one of the strangest turns of fate, when I visit my parents I am appalled by their diet. During my last stay there I whined, "Yeah, the pudding is nice, but how about some dietary fibre? Y'know, like, vegetables?" My siblings, all of whom once abhorred the over-boiled broccoli, now demand vegetables when planning meals. As long as we've got our roughage, dessert's order in our meal plan is irrelevant. Celebrate your adolescent defiance and let your youthful conscience act in loco parentis.