SUNDAY 15TH JANUARY 2023
Not only have I never done Dry January, it normally tends to be a month where I end up drinking quite a lot. This year I was determined to do Savoury January – i.e. no sweet treats – and I have completely failed. I found myself in the supermarket on Friday evening feeling pretty miserable and thinking that a bottle of red wine would go down so nicely. Clearly, that wasn’t an option so I resorted to chocolate. Feck it! I’ve come to realise that, despite all my New Year optimism, once the initial novelty of the good intentions has worn off, January is a drag with its cold weather and long, dark nights and comfort has to be taken where it can be found and this year I am finding it in sugar.
MY WHY
It’s not good though, is it? Turning to sugar? It may be even more socially acceptable than alcohol but, at the end of the day, it’s just another toxic, addictive substance that we stuff into our bodies. It causes a lot of the same harmful effects in the body as alcohol does, as well as a few of its own – type 2 diabetes, anyone? Since I started intermittent fasting, and later stopped drinking, I’ve been far more aware of the way sugar affects me. I’ve come to the conclusion that it makes me irritable. So, why continue to eat it? Well, that’s a whole other blog, isn’t it? I might even have said that in an earlier post. Suffice to say, I am aware that I could do with putting sugar under the microscope the way I’ve done with alcohol and overhauling my relationship with it. From time to time, I do a search to see if Annie Grace has come up with a 30 Day Sugar Experiment. Please, Annie, if you’re listening, you must do one! It completely baffles me how I can do what I’m doing with alcohol and yet I habitually crumble after 30 days when I try to ditch sugar, especially since I once managed it for around 14 weeks, lost weight and felt better for it. Anyway, I don’t want to go on and on about my relationship with sugar but I’ve been struck lately by the fact that, on some level, it’s just another example of humans putting stuff inside their bodies in an attempt to change the way they feel in the moment. How did it ever come to this? At what point did human beings decide that they needed to ingest stuff, not to nourish themselves, but to make themselves feel better? Surely Mother Nature didn’t make just one species that would need to look outside of itself for help to be everything it can be. Sure, she both blessed and cursed us when she gave us these giant brains that enable us to think out-with the present moment but I like to think that she also made sure that they were capable of solving the problems that they create. It stands to reason that all the answers must be within and we just need to free those giant brains from all the external stuff that we’ve been poisoning them with to access all we need to know to reach our full potential.
Theme Tune: Candybar Express by Love and Money