Extracting My Sweet Tooth

I looooove desserts.  Cake and ice cream and pie, oh my!  I blame my parents for this.  My mom for being a great baker and keeping a steady stream of cakes and cookies in the house which I grew accustomed to growing up.  And my dad for the sweet tooth gene - I definitely inherited it from him.

But alas, I know I'm a grown up now and have to take responsibility for what I'm putting in my body.  I've made changes to my diet in the past, and I've cut back on sugar over the years, but there's a little voice in my head that speaks up after dinner every night and it's demanding something sweet.

Towards the end of university life, I finally clued in that the can of pop (plus) that I was consuming every day wasn't very good for me and I stopped drinking pop.  I just told myself, "I'm not going to drink pop anymore," and that worked.  I stopped.  When I satisfy the craving I have about once a year for McDonald's fries, that comes with a kiddie size Coke, and if I ever go to the movies, I'll get a small Coke with my popcorn - but I can rarely finish it.  I don't even like pop anymore.

In June I decided to swear off Tim Horton's Iced Caps for the month.  I haven't had one since.  I didn't miss them all summer!  It was easy.

Heck, I gave up meat for 8 years!  It all started one day when I was thinking about how we don't really need meat in our diets and I said to myself (yes, I speak to myself a lot), "I wonder how long I can go without eating meat?"  Turns out I could go until I moved to China, where I took a little hiatus.  I've recently started eating small amounts of local meat - but not because I missed it, just because I was eating more processed food with my vegetarian diet that was coming from farther away and well, we're raising chickens in the backyard and that seems like a better option for my body and the planet.

Ok, meat's not a sweet, but the point is, I can give stuff up.  Except desserts.  I want dessert.  And I don't want fruit for dessert.  I can eat fruit in the afternoon when I want something sweet, and it will do.  But after dinner?  Fruit won't cut it.  Sometimes I can have a little piece of dark chocolate after dinner and that will be enough, but I can't do that every day.  Eventually that voice comes back and demands a slice of pie, or a bowl of ice cream or a slab o' cake.

I am trying, this month, to cut back my dessert intake.  I'm not trying to lose weight, I just want to eat less sugar.  But it's hard.  It's very, very hard.


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I went out for a 10K run today.  It was a beautiful day, but not such a beautiful run.  I haven't been drinking enough water (again) and was very thirsty the entire time.  I also got a cramp about a mile in to the run that wouldn't go away, so I ended up taking a walk break almost ever kilometer.  It's funny how less than a year ago, I'd be thrilled to finish 10K in under an hour, but today, even though I finished in (just) under an hour, it was a bad run.