Sugar Update

Not eating sweets isn't easy!  I've found that my cravings hit hardest at night and right after lunch.  In fact, I'm usually still chomping down on a salad or sandwich or soup when I start thinking about the cookie or chocolate I'll eat afterward.  It takes all of my will power not to acquire such an item and just run away!  And then there are the purist tendencies in me, to purchase and consume dark chocolate for health!  Damnit, health matters.  There are all sorts of benefits, after all.

I'm almost always more productive.  I'm almost always sharper.  Etc.

So it has been three days without any sweets at all.  The only thing I'll allow myself is single spoon of sugar in my coffee or tea.  The point is to ease back my body's expectation of the sweet stuff, and be more healthy, and lose weight, and all that happy horse shit, but to also not feel like I'm in a coma on a daily basis.  I think a lot of that is attributable to sugar. The story is that our bodies want to keep our blood sugar content consistent, so when we consume sugar, the body produces insulin, which, from my totally fragmentary understanding, forces excess sugar into the liver and muscle and basically stores it as fat. 

Refined carbohydrates, like white bread and anything with a lot of white flour,  are the worst separate from  sweets themselves.  Why?  Because our bodies break down the sugars in the those simple carbs really fast, and then store the extra sugar, just like we're eating sugar itself.  That's why  complex carbs are better.  It takes the body long to break them down, and hence, we have more sustained energy, and consequently feel better, and become less fat.

Anyway, I could lose about 15 pounds, I'm not going to lie, not only for aesthetics, as much as my bloated ego would like, but also because my bloated waistline is bad for my lower back, which gets pulled down and hurts. 

There's also something pure or rewarding about restrictions.  I'm not sure exactly how this works yet.  And that's a different blog post.