Giving up sweets

I eat when I'm stressed out, and while I was in Texas I ate pretty much non-stop.

To make things worse, we ate out almost every meal because, frankly, none of us felt like cooking after hanging out in a hospital or hospice room all day. And if I'm going to eat in a restraurant, I'm going to order food I don't normally get to eat....like dessert.

Not surprisingly I gained quite a bit of weight in a short period...as in it hurt my guts to sit down while wearing my jeans.

Drastic times call for drastic measures. One of the guys in my running club started a FaceBook page for giving up sweets. I am best motivated externally, and I knew public humiliation would keep me on track like nothing else. Confessing to my friends anytime I caved would surely prevent me from eating a cookie (or ten) and nibbling chocolate every night so I joined on December 10th.

I realize never eating sweets again is *completely* unrealistic, but I also know that until I kill my sweet tooth, a Take No Prisoners attitude is the best approach for me.

And I'm quite proud to say that I can count on one hand the number of sweets I've eaten since then. And they were each planned, small tastes like bites of pie at Christmas and a couple of squares of chocolate on New Years and so on.

Did I lose 50 pounds in a week? Nope. Try 1 pound in like 2 weeks. BUT I feel better, less sluggish and gross. And each time I had a sweet I found it less satisfying and didn't feel like I wanted to inhale extra servings of it.

What's my goal in this? I want to retrain my taste buds to crave healthier food, to find an apple more satisfing than a Snickers bar, to be content with a handful of cranberries and almonds as a snack instead of a handful of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

After crushing the Sweets monster, I decided to up the ante for a period of time, and I'll tell you about that next...