Sugar

I’ve always liked sugar.   One time, years ago, I stopped eating candy for a month.   A “whole month” at the time.   And that was just candy, not sugar in its additive form to so many things we eat.  I’ve been on and off with diets, all of which have been relatively minor insofar as I’m not significantly overweight.   Mostly my diets have consisted of not overeating.  

Over time I’ve stopped eating artificial sweeteners and now actively avoid them.   I try to eat less processed food, which has been an exercise in reduction as opposed to elimination.   And I try to eat more whole foods like fruits where I can.

But then there’s sugar.   I crave it a lot less now than I used to when I ate more processed foods and foods with significant added sugars, but I still have my days, or weeks, or months even.   With the recent Lyrica experiment where I stopped taking it for two weeks, I lost a good bit of weight due to nausea and lack of appetite.   In order to gain the weight back I had to overeat.   And that’s hard.

Overeating sounds like so much fun—eat a donut (I did), get some chocolate and have it throughout the day (I did) and eat more food (I tried).  Notice how a lot of that involves sugar?   I started drive-by eating candy out of the candy bowl.   I was buying Halloween candy and visiting the candy stash daily.   And I was eating candy corn by the handful.

I saw a YouTube video today and noticed a suggested video about a husband and wife who stopped eating sugar for thirty days.   It was humorous and candid and in the end reducing their processed sugar intake didn’t change their lives, but it did reduce their desire for sugar, something I’ve noticed happens to me when I’m eating less sugar.   They also felt full more of the time from the whole foods they were eating.

It was an eleven minute video that was proverbial kick in the pants I needed to get back to a better diet now that I’ve put the weight back on.   I went to the store and got more fruit.   I was hungry after dinner so I ate two apples—and I’m full, and they were delicious.

The Big Boy Update:  On the way to school my son was quiet for a bit and then told me, “I know a way to sharpen weapons.”   I asked him how,   It was fairly complex, but it started off with, “you take a motorcycle and turn it upside down…”. I told him what he was describing sounded like a sharpening stone and that was good thinking.   He said, “yes, but this is for really big weapons."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter got sent to her room for being rude and impolite.   She was hungry and mad and it was dinner time.   She had been insulting to me and I was playing the role of the hurt parent so I couldn’t interface with her but I was proud of my husband.   He wouldn’t let her out until she was able to be polite (she was fairly vile for a good while.)  She cried and kept sending notifications to us via Alesa, which is like a voice message just speaking out of all the devices in the house.   She was told if she did that one more time she would lose Alexa in her room.   It took a while, but she eventually turned into a kind, nice child and was able to have dinner.   She calmly and sincerely told me she was sorry without being prompted later.   Parenting: some days it takes a lot of work.