Sugar..
This is a massive subject but I just wanted to start the conversation. I’m about to leave to collect you from school & I was thinking about after school snacks which sent my mind to sugar. I know that you & I are very alike in our love of sugary treats. We totally devoured those Mickey Mouse rice crispy treats the other day 🙂 I’m not about to start telling you what to do & what not to eat, your Mum & Dad have got that covered at your age. I just wanted to tell you about something I’ve discovered after many years of being a ‘sugar monster’….
I have always had a sweet tooth & would always choose sweet over savoury. I was a skittles girl, I would always choose a cake with sugary frosting & would always pick sweets over crisps (although I do love crisps). Then came a moment I never expected. A few weeks ago on the radio I listened to Dr Michael Mosley talking about what happens to sugar in our bodies & it’s soooooo interesting. I bought a couple of books he’d written & I’ve been reading about the science. Now, I can’t honestly begin to explain it with my non science understanding brain but the message I took from it was clear. Sugar really is a trickster! It does all sorts of damage over time & that made me rethink……hmmm.
So in a very quiet way I decided to cut out the white stuff for a couple of days thinking it would just be too hard & how much I would miss treats. Weirdly, I didn’t really notice the lack of sugar!!! Huh? I know! I went about my normal days without changing anything else (we are usually pretty great at eating real food instead of processed) & I didn’t really miss it. After a few days I was in a cafe with my very awesome walking buddy Steph & we treated ourselves to a giant piece of double lemon cake to go with our coffees. OMG it was delicious! Exactly perfectly the yummiest lemon cake I’d ever eaten. We were at the end of a great walk, we chatted, ate the cake, drank our lattes & it was a great moment in the sunshine.
After that day I kinda forgot I wasn’t eating the sugar & I let it creep in a bit more. Then I was browsing through my instagram feed & saw a post by a lovely lady who said she’d been feeling a bit sluggish & she wasn’t sure why. I had been feeling the same & I suddenly realised it was the sugar. So, me not wanting to be too hasty, decided on a little experiment. The next couple of days I made a point of not anything sweet at all & literally by the second day I was feeling great again. It’s the weirdest clean feeling, I feel lighter & clearer in the head. It’s amazing!
Now, I’m not willing to go cold turkey & cut the white stuff altogether…forever. I think what happened to me & what happens to lots of us, (if we’re honest) is we get caught up in our day to day lives & forget what treats we’ve had. We reach for sugary treats for comfort, because we like the taste & because ‘we deserve it’! I think we’ve lost sight of what the word ‘treat’ means, we get ourselves into a habit of snacking & I’m sure a lot of it is mindless. My birthday is in 2 weeks & there is no way on earth that I’m missing out on your Mum’s red velvet cake with cream cheese frosting. NO WAY! I’m going to Devizes for a couple of nights my birthday week with Uncle Neil & that will involve some beer & for sure the locally made pie. I can relax & enjoy those things knowing that I’ve changed their category in my mind. Sweet treats are now occasional & do you know what? I feel really great!
So my advice to you is to start young! Get yourself in the habit of changing the category, sweet treats should be just that…a treat. Have something to look forward to on special occasions…Mum’s cakes are definitely in that category 🙂
Love you, Teeto x
The red velvet picture was stolen from pinterest & the picture of Steph is mine 🙂
teeto1975 