My Recurring Holiday Miracle
There is no Halloween candy in my house. But it doesn’t matter. Because I didn’t want it and I didn’t eat any of it. And that is my recurring holiday miracle.
Yes yes. I think sugar is poison. To me at the very least. But I am not the food police, or anyone’s parent. And also, I remember Halloween as a kid. The dressing up. Walking around the neighborhood I lived in with friends and cousins, ringing doorbells, shrieking with excitement. All the other kids doing the same. And the candy was so exciting because it was the big prize on top of all of the fun! So yes, I give out candy at Halloween. And I always buy more than I need.
But the morning after I packed up all those left over mini chocolate bars and sent them to work with my husband. Big men doing physical labor all day made quick work of it.
But I never thought about it. Never craved it. Never thought about a single morsel of it as mine. That is not mine. It’s poison to me.
When I put sugar in my body, it sets up a craving for more. But there is the other blissful side of that. When I don’t put sugar in my body, and by now it has been well over 16 years, I don’t crave it. I don’t even really see it, let alone have any kind of feelings about it.
I did work to get to this point. I had to change the way I thought about food. I had to stop romanticizing thoughts about sugar. Stop thinking pastry sounded good and start thinking it sounded like a slow, painful death. I had to keep myself away from it entirely for a long time. Stay out of particular grocery store aisles. Cross the street to get away from certain street vendor smells. Avert my eyes from the dessert case when I went to get a cup of coffee. I had to do these things for years.
But the work is done. And now my job is maintenance. As in stay away from the first bite of sugar. But that part is so much easier when my body doesn’t remember it. And remembering every day that I am an addict, keeps me from reintroducing them.
onceafatgirl 