MMWS: The End– Wow, that was… something.

Hi.  Remember me?

It has been an interesting couple of weeks.  By ‘interesting’, I mostly mean ‘bad’.  I don’t want to get into the whole thing out here in the public square, but things went a little haywire.

Oddly enough, I stuck to the deal, more or less.  And, by the old clock on the wall, My Month Without Sweets is over.

What did I learn?  Well, I think that I learned that one should not be addicted to something and stop using it cold turkey without expecting… consequences.  I used to eat a lot of sugar.  I also used to drink a lot of beer.  I don’t do either of those things anymore.  That’s not to say that I spent my weekends covered in melted Ben and Jerry’s, sleeping on a pile of Budweiser cans in a van down by the river.  It means that I rarely passed through the kitchen without grabbing a handful of Trader Joe’s Chocolate Covered <Fill In Fruit or Nut>.  I’d frequently munch down a half-pint of Haagen-Dasz (equal time).  I added sugar to my coffee.  I drank fruit juice.  Pastries.  “Energy bars”. Kettle corn.  And on and on and on. It means that more often than not, one beer led to two.  Two often slid, almost unnoticed, into four.  The next morning I’d wake up and think “that has got to stop.”

I had no idea.

I had no idea that there is sugar, in one form or another, in practically every processed food– sometimes, great gobs of it.  Not adding sugar to your coffee is about as meaningful as not putting mustard on a foot-long chili dog to cut down on your salt intake.  I had no idea how seriously that huge sugar intake was affecting me.  I knew that I felt lousy after an excessive binge on “snack granola” or cookies.  I didn’t know that I was feeling those ups and downs all day long.  I didn’t know that I was getting fat because I had no sense of how much, in general, I was eating.  Quite a lot, as it turns out.

After about a week, my body let me know, in no uncertain terms, that it was experiencing some blood chemistry that it had not seen… well, ever.  I can’t attribute my exaggerated emotional state entirely to the sugar withdrawal, but I have no doubt whatsoever that it exacerbated the situation dramatically.  I began to feel like I was losing control of my emotions, and I had no idea why it was happening.  It didn’t take too long after I regained my senses to realize that what had happened was that my body had gotten the sugar-DTs.  I couldn’t identify why things had become so extreme because it wasn’t some issue.  It was lots of issues as seen through a magnifying glass of sugar withdrawal.

I’m sure there are people reading this who are thinking, “Oh, please, Moonbeam.  Go eat a bowl of wheatgrass.”  Well, maybe not that exactly, but you get my drift.  I know that when I heard people talk about avoiding gluten or eating alkalizing foods, I’d roll my eyes a little.  I don’t think I will anymore.  Why not let them try?  Maybe it will make them feel better.  Unless you’re so comfortable with your diet that you never question what you eat or drink, you might think about reconsidering all of it.  If you are, well, you’re either very well-adjusted or lying.  It’s pretty clear that our evolution did not revolve around Cherry Coke and Newman Os, isn’t it?  Why is it so strange to think that eating something so foreign and useless to our bodies isn’t going to make us feel awful?

OK, if you don’t want to think about it in broad, philosophical strokes, let’s talk about concrete results.  I lost about 20 lbs.  I was not starving myself.  I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with very few missed meals, if any.  I snacked on fruit, hummus, cheese, and nuts.  But I snacked a lot less.  Very little, in fact.  I usually snacked a lot before because I was bored.  I was bored, and there was a box of chocolate truffles in the pantry.  Sure.  Why not?  I heard somewhere that chocolate was really good for you.  Munch, munch, munch…

But during my month, I forced myself to know one thing: did it contain sweeteners?  If it did, I couldn’t eat it.  Well, that eliminates… oh, everything in a container, more or less.  And that made me stop and think.  I wasn’t really hungry.  A glass of tea would satisfy my need to consume something.  Dinner would be ready soon.  If I did feel a little hungry, I could grab an apple.  The difference was as much that I was forced to stop myself in my automaton tracks and think about what I was doing as it was that I wasn’t eating the sugar.

The weight came off, and I hadn’t even considered that aspect when I started.  Otherwise, I would have tracked it more closely.  I was pushing 200 lbs. a few months ago (I’m six feet tall), and it wasn’t my massive pecs and glutes.  It was my soft, squishy midriff.  I weighed myself somewhere along the line, and I’d dropped to 180 from the plateau of 190 I’d gotten to before.  Then 175.  Then 168.  My weight leveled off right around 170.  My clothes all fit better, if a little loosely in some cases.  I had more physical energy.  I was able to shake that “what’s the use” feeling that I usually got when I knew I needed to exercise, but it just seemed like it would take forever to lose the flab.  So, I started going to the gym again.

So what happens now that it’s over?  At first, I thought I’d make the month watching my clock and dive into a pan of fresh brownies at 30 days plus one millisecond.  Hardly.  I just don’t really care anymore.  Not in that chronic-depression-commercial-person-with-their-head-against-a-rainy-window kind of way, either.  It’s just that I don’t crave it, and honestly, I know most of that stuff isn’t really that good.  Be honest with yourself next time you’re eating something you know you shouldn’t.  Is it really that tasty?  Or does it represent indulgence in a “treat” for yourself.  I think I barely tasted it usually.  That doesn’t mean that I won’t eat one of my own cookies sometime or try homemade pie.  I will happily expose myself to the ravages of sugar for those things.  And then I’ll stop.

I’ll stop because I don’t want to waddle  up to the 200 lb. line again.  I’ll stop because I like not feeling crappy after auto-eating a bowl of chocolate covered raisins.  And I’ll stop because I know that, just as my body hit me over the head with a frying pan for cutting out sugar, it’ll just as easily fall right back into my old habits.  I’m finally starting to understand why people like to have rules for things like alcohol, smoking, gambling, soda, or pornography.  We’re creatures that love a good dopamine buzz.  We’ll tend to self-administer our chosen stimulation until we’ve gone so far that it’s evidently clear that we’re no longer driving the bus.  Until we’re fat, broke, diabetic, or divorced.

Am I glad I did the experiment even after the consequences?  Oh, yes.  I don’t know if I’ll look back on this, while chewing on a football sized chocolate-covered rice crispy bar, and be embarrassed about it, but I don’t think so.  I hope I’m too wise (old) to be able to convince myself that everything I went through was a delusion.  I believe this one’s going to stick.  We’ll just have to see.

Oh, and I failed a couple of times, not that it matters much.  Once, I ate some pita chips not knowing that they had sugar in them.  Later, I ate some knowing full well.  I probably ate some sugar in my dinner because I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to impose this on anyone else.  I ate what my wife made.  She’s an excellent cook, and it was always delicious.  And then, finally, I had a piece of the lemon layer cake with whipped cream, strawberry sauce, and sliced strawberries that I made for my son on his birthday just a few days short of the finish line.  If there has ever been a justification for eating sugar, that cake was it. I’ll let you decide if I failed.  I mean for yourself.  I know that I didn’t.

Other than that, I stuck to the plan very rigorously.  No Halloween candy.  Not one piece.  And we had Kit Kat bars.  That’s gotta be worth something.  I picked up and put down, literally, hundreds of items in my house or the store.  I went through every package of bread one day to find a loaf without added sugar (I failed.).  I examined crackers, mayo, spaghetti sauce, and everything else I considered buying.  There was sugar in all but a few examples.  I actually had to make my own mayonnaise.  I hadn’t done that in years.

Anyway, thank you to everyone who sent mail during my hiatus expressing their concern.  The blog world is genuinely full of very nice people.  I’m fine.  I’ve got my issues to deal with, like anyone else in the world, but at least I don’t have to look at my love handles in the mirror anymore.  I’ve started exercising regularly again, and that always helps my mood.  Most importantly, I have the satisfaction of knowing that I am, indeed, driving the bus.  I will decide if and when I engage in a vice, and I will decide when I don’t.  I will not listen to my old rationalizations.  I won’t have the need to wash down my vice with a self-recrimination chaser.

It actually makes so many other things seem manageable and possible.  I really had no idea.