Apple Sauce

Are you addicted to sugar? How do you handle that? Do you handle that? For the past year or so, I've been ignoring addiction by giving in to it.

I have a sickeningly high sugar addiction, or what I'm believed to be that. About five or six years go I was told I have Insulin Resistance. All I could do about that was lose weight, eat healthy. It wasn't long after that when I entered college and undid all the weight loss I had done in my last two years of highschool. Through Weight Watchers I had lost almost twenty pounds. It doesn't seem like a lot, especially not for two years. I lost most of the weight the first year, and maintained the second year.

I still live at my childhood home with my parents and my younger brother. My mom never has junk food in the house, and while this can be good during times when I'm trying to lose weight, it tends to drive me nearly insane when all I want is something genuinely sweet. Most of the sweet foods in my house, puddings, a sugar free chocolate souffle and countless amounts of powdered juices contain Splenda. It seems like such a great sugar substitute, but the taste lingers in my mouth for hours afterward, and I can't be bothered to build up a tolerance.

Tonight I went on my usual cabinet raid looking for anything sort of sweet. Nights when I do this, I end up consuming anything I can just to fill that urge. I bounce back and forth between salty and sweet, hoping something will satisfy the void I have. Tonight, as I was looking through the bins in the refridgerator, I consciously decided I was going to have apple sauce - the organic no sugar added kind. It was a decent decision, I sprinkled my bowl with cinnimon and pretended it was some sort of dessert. It was, afterall. Because who ever said dessert needs to be full of sugar? My mind, I guess. It's what I've become accustomed to expect, even living in a house without sweets, it's hard to escape the mindset.

And from tonight on in, I'm going to try eating fruit when I'm craving sugar. Right now I don't have the focus to try and break the sugar addiction by abstaining -- in 2005 for about two months I did South Beach Diet. Though I did well, I stopped because of boredom and my heart wasn't focused enough to keep on going and figure out the way through the boredom. I believe most of the foods on South Beach Diet, and Weight Watchers Core program and some other so called diets are on the right track. I think we as humans tend to get off track, especially in America where everything is manufactured to be quick, cheap and tasty. For now though, I don't want to participate in a diet. I'm loosely tracking calories on Sparkpeople.com while trying to figure out a lifestyle I can make into my own.

And so, I've found my first habit to replace, sweets with fruits. Still sugar but of a different sort.