The pint-a-day habit started when I was working 12-hour double shifts delivering pizza in a college town, on the financial upswing after the ’06-’09 financial crisis. It seemed like all the students had credit cards, cash was flowing, and tips were generous.

After work, usually past midnight, I’d buy a pint of creamy euphoric goodness with my tips, ending the day by eating it before a video gaming session that would often keep me up past sunrise. Ice cream gave me great comfort and was, perhaps sadly, the main thing I looked forward to on most of those days.

To be fair, addiction-wise, I was much better off than my pizza coworkers that were using heroin.

My life changed a lot over the 15 years that followed: the largest milestone was becoming a software engineer. But the daily ritual of eating a pint of ice cream at the end of the day remained relatively stable. I quit for a year once, during a year-long nutrition and exercise program, and abstained for days or weeks at a time on other occasions. Nevertheless, I identified as an ice cream addict, and I was daily haunted by the feeling that this was out of my control.

Previously, I overcame a cigarette addiction in my mid-twenties. I lost count of failed attempts to quit, and was more demoralized during those years than I ever was by my broken relationship with ice cream. Unlike cigarettes, ice cream brings me joy and euphoria, so my feelings on ice cream were more mixed–I felt ambivalent about quitting.

The path to quitting cigarettes came in two aha! moments for me. The first was reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. The insight this book provided me was that change is possible. I never applied their advice outside trying to quit smoking, but I was so convinced of my own powerlessness that what I needed was simply a sense of agency. I redoubled my efforts to quit after reading it, but continued to fail.

The second eureka! moment that led to quitting smoking was reading The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Alan Carr. This book is brilliant: it asks you not to quit until you’re ready, and then systematically refutes that there’s anything remotely beneficial about smoking on an emotional level. Most people rationally understand why smoking is a losing game and a waste of resources, but identify as a smoker and are socially supported by fellow smokers. In the second to last chapter, the book asks you to set it aside–don’t read further–until you’re ready to quit. The final step is simply to identify as a non-smoker.

That may sound flimsy, because it’s a one-paragraph recap, but it was what allowed me to quit smoking. Identity is a powerful force.

So: I’ve successfully ended an addiction before, in spite of smoking being a notoriously difficult addiction to kick among legal substances.

In my attempts to stop eating a pint of ice cream every night, I’ve abstained, I’ve tried substitutes like light ice cream, yogurt, custard, and smaller portions of other desserts. Despite these efforts to stop, I kept eating a pint per day, very consistently.

Along the way, I learned about a little known effect that health researchers avoid talking about publicly because it violates all the culturally popular shame and moralizing about sweets, including ice cream: ice cream consumption is positively correlated with good health outcomes.

How can this be? Common speculations include: it’s nutrient dense, it’s comforting, and well-adjusted, healthy people tend to do what feels good. I’m under the impression nobody has empirically proven why ice cream has this effect, but it gave me some comfort knowing that that regular ice cream consumption can be part of a healthy life.

I’ve received advice on quitting from friends, the best of which was, “Why don’t you just have one bite?”. What’s sad about this is that it was a great suggestion, but because I didn’t want to hear it at the time, and I was busy identifying as an addict, it fell on deaf ears.

As with quitting smoking, it was something I read that ended my pint-a-night ice cream habit. This time, it was serendipitous: I wasn’t looking for inspiration or a solution to help me quit. I was browsing Hacker News, when I came across an article discussing that a large portion of addictions end spontaneously. 15 years prior, I’d read about this phenomenon in a book titled Motivational Interviewing, and the reminder shocked me into realization.

I don’t have to eat a pint of ice cream every day. I’m free to eat as little or as much as I like.

Since then, I’ve been eating three to five bites of ice cream most nights. I’m happier, I feel better, and I have no plans to stop eating ice cream. But the biggest, most freeing change is that I no longer identify as an addict.

My problem was identifying as an addict.

Postscript: Favorite Flavors

I’m pretty picky about flavors with three go-to options that have served me well over the years: Oat of this Swirled, Sweet Cream Caramel Brownie, and as a ubiquitously-available standby, Half Baked. I’ll eat other flavors, but I’d really rather not, most of the time.