Apart from the obvious (pregnancy, hormones in general, sunshine, hangover, disappointment, happiness, weight loss therapy rejection, rainy skies...) what does it mean when the first thing you want for breakfast is banana pudding? It was all I could do this morning to engineer my arm away from the refrigerator and toward the cereal cupboard, and even then I chose sweet-tasting granola over bran flakes. Of course, sugar begets sugar, so now I want Pepsi, spearmint leaf candy, and a peanut butter hot dog bun, which contains more sugar than you might expect.
As synchronicity would have it, just as I sat down to my cereal, Wayne Dyer sat down as Ellen Degeneres' guest. Typically I am not too engaged with Mr. Dyer. I think he's well-intended, but simplistic...that is, until he started talking about sugar and how (as he was taught by the belly fat doctor) 100 years ago (please don't quote me) the average American ingested 15 (or was it 25?) grams of sugar per day. Today, we eat ten times that much in any twenty-four-hour period, which, when you think about it, is scary enough to make a person want to spew her granola (17 grams in five bites' worth) across the room.
As an example of better living, and likely as a means of touting his new book -- is there any other reason people do talk shows anymore? -- Wayne Dyer lost 17 pounds in 30 days by reducing his daily sugar intake to approximately 20 grams per day. And I know he's right about sugar, because I fell back into the Pepsi vat about two weeks ago and I am packing on the pounds faster than you can say Fatty Fatty Fat Fat!
Years back, when Don and I went on the Hellmann diet -- I wish it had included the mayonnaise, because there is nothing tastier that a bucketful of Hellmann's slathered across cheap white bread -- I quickly learned what it meant to break from sugar addiction and how certain foods are monumental carbohydrate (which is another word for sugar) inducers. Even diet pop has a way of making a person want more more more...how do you like it? how do you like it?...more more more...and certain vegetables -- peas and carrots, for example -- are also carbohydrate inductive (if that's even the right way to say it). I know the reduction all works, too, because during those months when I was eating properly my body actually found a way to perspire, something it had not done healthily in years.
I know all of the reasons why I ought to try and do better. I don't need to list them here and, let's face it, you don't want to read them. But the thing for me isn't always about what I need to do. Sometimes it's a simple as...Oh...look at that pretty yellow pudding...doesn't it smell good? Remember how Mom used to make pudding from scratch, sometimes whipping it into Sunday pies with real whipped cream on top? And remember how she told me that I was beautiful and that it was only a bit of baby fat and that I would lose it, and how she put the word 'darling' on the end of all her sentences and would look at me as if I were the most wonderful girl in the world?
And then I remember how a lot of that didn't turn out to be true and that I wasn't the most beautiful girl (all right, maybe the second most beautiful...have it your way) and that it wasn't just baby fat and that, in fact, I wasn't always a darling. And then that tidy collection of thought and craving urge me forward, my chubby self lunging toward the refrigerator, spoon in hand, all of my senses and nonsenses merging, my reason overtaken by an irrepressible desire to gorge myself on yesterday's memories and today's marvellous promise of treats.
Besides, what's a fat girl to do? I barely sweat as it is. It's either eat up that pudding or spend the better part of my late morning writing blog entries about it -- because everyone knows that as soon as I finish here I wouldn't dream of running top-speed downstairs and head straight for the fridge.
Sugar, ah honey honey,
You are my candy, girl,
And you got me wantin' you...
<:^)
