Duff McKagan’s column runs every Thursday on Reverb. He writes about what music is circulating through his space every Monday.Most of you must know at this point that I have two daughters, 9 and 12. My 9-year-old has been a Brownie and a Girl Scout for the past three years. It’s a really sweet endeavor that gives her some life tools that as a father I wouldn’t even know how to begin to approach. It is ALL good.Ah, but once a year, it becomes time for the Girl Scout Cookie campaign, and my darling little girl has become a crack sales-person, especially when it comes to me and all my guy friends who come over for Sunday football. Little girls just have a way of making grown men melt and do whatever the pigtailed princess wants. My daughter does very well in her fundraising campaign as a result.For me, I always end up buying around 10 boxes of each flavor, and these days I think there are nine different flavors. Let me back up a little bit and inform you about my strict diet program that started about a week after I got sober in 1994. A diet that helped clean out my system and that I have stayed on because, well, I’ve just GOT to hang on to my girlish figure, don’t I?In my drinking and drug-using days, health and nutrition were completely foreign topics to me, and I was lucky if I ate a hot dog or Fritos once every two or three days. My view from that deep, addicted hole did not allow for much thought on cholesterol levels or bad carbs vs. good carbs. Clean food and vitamins were for those who planned to live past age 30, and there was no way, I thought, that I would be in that category.Yeah. But I got my wake-up call in 1994, and suddenly I realized that maybe I was going to be one of those few guys who were going to live (the list of those like me was becoming too rarefied at that juncture). I’ve written here before about bits and pieces of my recovery, but a huge part of it was my diet. After putting so many harmful things into my body for so long, I needed to purge my system and begin to learn the process of nutrition and fueling my blood, organs, and muscle tissue to help me regain my health and reverse some of the damage done. I was also about 50 pounds heavier that I am now, and the weight I was carrying was NOT muscle. All the sugar from the tons of alcohol had left me with a spare tire of fat and bloat. NOT sexy.A friend of mine turned me on to a diet that was being used for people with cancer and other diseases, who were showing a marked improvement by adhering to it. It consisted of watery fruits in the morning, greens with fish for lunch (no snacking!), greens with fish or free-range chicken for early dinner (no late-night food!), and LOTS of exercise!This taught me how to eat three meals a day, and it really started to make me feel better. I could actually feel the nutrients as they entered my blood system. With the exercise and no carbs, my weight just started to drop off, and I could see muscle tone returning. This was all a huge victory for me, and I started to feel GREAT all the time.Flash forward a few years, and my wife and I have small kids at home. New foods start to pile up in our pantry. Potato chips. Cookies. Ice cream in the freezer, chocolate around Halloween and Christmas. When you quit alcohol, there is still a huge craving for all the sugar you’ve just cut out, and for me it’s a constant battle. Plenty of times I have downed a whole family-sized Hershey’s chocolate bar with almonds in less than 10 minutes, much as I used to down a gallon of vodka. I always feel like absolute shit after these episodes, so I really make an effort to just not have chocolate or cookies in the house. If my wife or kids have the stuff, I literally ask them to hide it from me and not even let me know about it at all. Oh, but I just ordered 90 boxes of Thin Mints and chocolate macaroon cookies from my sweet little daughter, didn’t I? They arrived two days ago. Fuuuuuuck!That first night, I ate two whole boxes. I felt like that guy with melted chocolate all over his face and hands, crying uncontrollably, watching a sappy soap while listening to Celine Dion. Yesterday, I gave the cookies away, sheepishly, to some friends. The things a father will do. The things my head will do to me in the throes of chocolate mania.P.S. My daughter got her Girl Scout badge to go along with my badge of shame that must have been outwardly visible to those friends I gave the cookies to.