Six weeks Down, Only Forty-Six to Go!

Well, I have now passed the six week mark, avoiding all sorts of sugary things.  I admit, it isn't much fun.  Usually by the time evening comes along, I am really, really ready for a treat, but I endure.  Last week was a pretty bad week for just about everyone in my family, but I, for one, am slowly pulling out of sadness of losing my Aunt.  I gave myself a few days to just not worry about diet (except, of course, no cookies or cake), but decided to buckle back down before I un-did a lot of hard work.  Losing my Aunt is going to be difficult thing to deal with for a long, long time.

Anyway, thank you all for your kind words of encouragement and your suggestions for trying to help me through the last week.  Melanie and Paul, in particular, had a lot of great things to say, and I took many of them to heart.  The reality is that, at least for me, eating is as much an emotional issue as it is a physical one (I think this is true for almost all of us).  Dealing with one deep-seeded emotional issue is hard, but having a second one blind-side you, like the death of someone you love dearly, can make things almost impossible.  I think I found a happy medium by eating a few of my favorite things and focusing on things other than the diet for a few days, but not letting myself slip back entirely into old habits. 

The amazing thing is that eating junk food and things that aren't that good for you isn't all that comforting.  Instead of making you feel good, fried or fatty food actually makes you feel worse inside and out.  That is the great paradox of fast food:  we crave it, especially when we are emotionally vulnerable, and yet, it doesn't make us feel any better, it actually makes us feel worse.  It is a highly illogical thing, then, for us to seek after bad foods when we feel bad, because they will only make us feel worse.  Ultimately for me is that despite my success avoiding sugar, I still feel like this whole thing is a bit of a gimmick.  What I really need is a complete transformation from a sugar-eater to a non-sugar-eater.  Right now, I am still a sugar-eater who is begrudgingly abstaining from sweetness--and that is not the same thing as a non-sugar-eater.  The bottom line:  I still have a long way to go.