My road to wellness is a familiar one but not one I take often. It’s more like the road to Grandma’s house. Over the river looks so familiar. You go around the corner through the woods and you think excitedly, “Oh! We’re almost there!” You love visiting Grandma’s, but rarely to you stick around and live there. It’s hard to stay healthy and stick to your diet plan. It’s difficult to break away from work sometimes and just take a little downtime. And the cupcakes they keep bringing to work? Impossible to resist~!
Through some trial and error over the years I have discovered that sugar is the enemy. Sugar is in EVERYTHING we eat and it’s hard to avoid. Everything has sugar, high fructose corn syrup, cane juice, dextrose, sucrose, glucose, maltose – the many guises lurk in everything from breakfast foods to dinner entree ingredients. Read a couple of nutrition labels if you don’t believe me.
A few years ago, I conducted a will-power experiment that was more difficult to do than it seemed. I had a plan to cut out all processed sugars from my diet for two full months. I didn’t do this in the extreme sugar-busters way mind you – I still ate fruit often and I’d sweeten coffee with fresh stevia leaves from the garden. It was difficult to avoid meals that everyone else had when you do communal cooking with your roommates and a beckoning sweet tooth is so difficult to ignore. I ended up culling a lot of prepackaged foods. Dessert was peaches or a handful of raisins. I grew appreciation for black coffee again. My dog even got better food – geez, why is high fructose corn syrup in kibble??
This did something crazy. It kick-started my metabolism. I felt great and I had more energy. Even though I reintroduced sugar slowly after the strict two months, I lost 50 pounds that year.
But of course I’ve slid back onto the evil sugar habit and 15 pounds have slowly crept back. I’m sleeping more than I had before. I crave sweets all the time again. This has GOT to stop.
So step one of the Road to Wellness: Avoiding sugar again. Not going so well in this first week or so. Someone set a trap in the office this morning with delicious red velvet cupcakes (complete with patriotic American flags poking out of the tops of each) waiting for us.
I only ate half of one! Don’t judge me!
Maybe tomorrow I’ll do better.
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The Mississippi Free Press produced this story through the MFP Solutions Lab, supported by the Solutions Journalism Network. This series digs into Mississippi’s systemic issues and sheds light on responses to them in other communities. Beyond just reporting on problems, these stories interrogate their causes and inspect potential solutions.
