Sugar......by Heather

Thought I should raise this subject sooner rather than later.

Because I'm giving it up.

Its important to say from the onset that I have been a devotee of the stuff, I have worshipped at the alter of all things sweet for as long as I can remember. So this certainly isn't something I am taking on lightly.

Only today I  nipped in to our local Co-op to pick up some basil; and as I walked around the shop I realised there were whole aisles put over to the sweet stuff. And its depressing, .because I like nearly all of it.

However,
I firmly believe its bad for me.
I believe it is the mainstay of the more obvious foodstuffs that a person wanting to lose weight should be avoiding as a matter of course.
Worse - it has become a secret ingredient in foodstuffs you wouldn't imagine should have sugar in it.

I  tried to ignore these points last year when I attempted to diet whilst still maintaining I could eat the stuff - in moderation of course!

That piece of stupidity left the door wide open to eventual failure -and even ran contrary to the known fact that it was a lot more serious than just because I like it.

Cigarettes. Lets just consider them for a moment.

I have never smoked, roundly put off of the habit from years of watching my parents chuff like a billy train, rattling and sputtering on them and the trail of ash trays, and brown ceilings that followed. I'm glad I never was tempted, having seen just how difficult it was for my Mother to actually give them up - an achievement never matched by my Father, it took a triple heart by-pass to get the message over to him. And you would have thought that I,  with my smoker aversion, would never have fallen for a 40 a day-er? Not me! And it was no easy thing to watch him struggle to give them up - but give them up he did.

The main reason for the smoking ban, wasn't just the ash trays, or the smell - in fact very little of my revulsion was to do with the cosmetics of the habit. Cigarettes are killers. We know this, we know, whether we want to acknowledge it, that with each smoke comes the ever increased risk to our health.

I have always been a bit sneery about smoking - why would anyone take to a habit that clearly is so dangerous?

Move forward and substitute nicotine for sugar.
There is a growing band of folk who would have me believe that sugar is every bit as dangerous to me as nicotine is. Neither of them are acute, I'm not going to drop down dead from one drag or a teaspoon of the white stuff - but just like with smoking, at some point I will have had one teaspoon too many.

I am 50 years of age.

Old enough to know when I should be grown up about dealing with this problem.
And just like my Mother and Husband - I need to go cold turkey. And unlike my Father, I don't intend to  have heart disease before I tackle it.

I am going to beat this particular drum a number of times. Because just like the committed smokers out there, some of you may need some evidence, rather than just my say so.