Sweet Poison

Today it’s my wife birthday, she is 20,089 days young!

We are going to eat birthday cake all day. The cake of life with a thick layer of health icing.

Happy birthday girl, you are like wine, so delicious :)


In yesterday’s post I unscrupulously undressed and show nakedness. I admitted I had addictions, and I want to expand on what I think was my worst one: “I was addicted to sugar” 

Just a reminder: I’m not a doctor or nutritionist; I’m just someone who has spent 55 years walking this earth, reading, observing and learning. From time to time, I might unwillingly state facts that are wrong. There are always people and studies to contradict one another about everything, including nutrition. So I’m adding this disclaimer here; if you do some research and check out nutrition facts and you don’t agree with me, it’s ok as I post about facts I believe to be true.

Maybe all of you already know this fact: I read a few months ago about refined sugar, it equated it to a poison. The reason it’s so bad is because to be digested, refined sugar drains and leaches our body of vitamins and minerals. Refined sugar is not digested by our stomach, our liver converts it into fat.

“According to Statistics Canada, the average Canadian consumes 26 teaspoons of sugar per day. That works out to 40 kilograms per year.” That’s a lot of fat, folks. I can’t remember where I read it but it’s even worse in the U.S.

From what I read, a lot of that sugar intake is from soft drinks. Watch-out for those!

Some time ago, my youngest daughter lost 114 pounds. She took two years to do this great accomplishment.

Three years ago, she hit rock bottom, she was down to 150 lbs. From the beginning of her journey, she has been keeping track of the amount of food she eats every day and she has been exercising. Unfortunately, even while still eating less than what a women her age needs to maintain her weight, it has slowly crept back up. In the past 3 years she gained about 25 lbs. She wants to lose those extra pounds.

It’s hard to see a loved one struggling while doing everything they can. In order to help her lose that weight, she recently consulted a nutritionist. The nutritionist asked her to eat normally, stop weighing all her food but to keep track of everything she ate until their next meeting. Not a hard thing to do, my daughter has been tracking her food using Spark People’s web site and can show everything she ate for the past 5 years or so. The nutritionist also told my daugher to stop eating lifesavers and peppermint candy!

My daughter was eating one lifesavers after every lunch and one peppermint candy after supper. One lousy lifesavers is worth about 10 calories! I thought “Come on, don’t listen to the nutritionist, eat your lifesavers”. The nutritionist told my daughter that she was severely addicted to sugar and that one lifesavers a day was feeding her addiction. And when you have an addiction you have a craving and in her case, she always felt like she was starving.

 

It makes so much sense to me now! When I started my health journey, I didn’t plan to ban anything, I thought I’d eat less and temporarily cut off all the junk food, cold turkey. It turns out I actually stopped eating the wrong stuff long enough that when I decided I could re-introduce the “banned” food, I didn’t want them anymore!

What I think happened is that my brain knowing it would get that junk food in a short future, didn’t torture me in wanting them now. But by the time I was ready to eat all that junk food, I was not craving it anymore and therefore didn’t suffer from withdrawal. It turned out to be the easiest change ever.

In the past, I tried to control myself around junk food, eating just one little sweet, just one small ice cream cone; it didn’t work too good for me and before long, I wanted more. Starving for junk food is draining and it takes so much energy. From the beginning, by surrendering to my need to be healthy and by being tough with myself and disciplined the whole process quickly became easier and easier with each passing day.

DON’T surrender; you can rid yourself of any addictions!

Tomorrow I have a challenge for you guys, until then, have a great and leaner day. Thanks for reading, you are such a source of inspiration to me.