Monday Resets Plus Six Months Of No Sugar

Monday Resets Plus Six Months Of No Sugar & How Its Going

Monday Resets

Good Monday morning! In retirement I learned to love Mondays rather then dread them as I did during my working years, because they now represent a restart. They are a blank page on which I can write whatever I wish for the week to deliver, and renew efforts in areas where I may have stumbled. 

Areas where I stumbled and will now reset:

• Drink ample water. We are now in our season of humidity, and I can tell if I'm not drinking enough water by how frequently light headed I'll feel when physically exerting.
• Study Spanish. Fell off the wagon here and will now attempt to return to prior habit of doing 15 minutes of online and free Spanish Duolingo a day.
• Reading my August nonfiction book. I'm almost done, but oh gosh is it dry reading. So I'll return to my 30 minutes of self designated AM reading today, and then mark Mr. McCullough off my reading list forever. Too dry for me, even if I appreciate his ability to organize an array of previously scattered historical notes into a single cohesive book.

My No Sugar Efforts At The Six Month Mark

The sugar beast has been slayed! Really, there has been a noticeable turn in my efforts to remain sugar free - I continue to no longer think about sugar, but even more exciting, I genuinely no longer want to eat it or even to smell it!

To my shock, but a really, really good shock, I no longer think about sugar in any form or at any point of the day. Rather, it represents a terrible coping mechanism I had developed from a very young age, that did nothing to enhance my life. It doesn't bother me one iota to be around sweets or to watch other people enjoying them. I can now bake and serve sweets without having any desire to sample or indulge. I feel free, free, free, which is a reward I did not see coming. I just wanted to stop feeling like my life evolved around my next sugar hit.

So my food life is good nowadays. I'm eating for the sake of fueling up and that's really about it.

And not at all the point of giving up sugar, though certainly my desire to lose some weight was part of it, but I am getting daily comments about my thinness and overall appearance, and I am deeply, deeply appreciative of each and every comment. The comments validate my efforts, provide a lovely moment for my ego to feed on, and incentivize me to keep on keeping on. Sugar now represents an awful return to my former self, where I lived in a state of constant self-criticism. 

And a note on my recent efforts, and the alcohol effect. I have no issues with alcohol. I've always been a light drinker, and I don't think about alcohol really ever at all. I enjoy it on the weekends, and am happy to drink pretty much just water during the week. However, back when I first began my efforts to stop eating sugar, I began to notice that after having a glass of wine on, usually, a Friday night, I wanted sugar. Badly wanted sugar. So I began to experiment, and realized that the alcohol weakened my self resolve just enough to make me really, really want to dive back into sugar.

And while I didn't stop drinking, because I never actually reached for the sugar, I just wanted to, this is no longer occurring. My battle with sugar is over, in that I simply no longer want it at all, even after a glass of wine. It represents an immediate return to a dark part of my life that I want no part of. Instead, a glass of wine is now making me want to eat something, anything, in general, which is making me laugh. It's like water - the active brain wants to find a way somewhere somehow!

So I'm now only having wine two nights a week instead of three, and I'm focusing on half glasses instead of  full glasses for now. If this follows form with my sugar efforts, eventually I'll be completely reset into my new lower calorie lifestyle, and wine won't be effective whatsoever in moving that needle.

To be clear, I haven't regained any weight. I just find it's been harder to stay with my new lifestyle after having a full glass of wine. So I'm drinking a lot more water on weekends, and limiting my wine to just one half glass on one or two weekend nights. The scale will generally show an uptick on Monday, reflecting the extra calories I tend to reach for after a bit of wine, but I can handle that both mentally and physically, since I'm able to knock back the weight in just a day or two of resumed 'normal' eating.

So an interesting correlation that I didn't see coming.

A recent event where I simply enjoyed the evening and gorgeous sunset while drinking water. I enjoy wine, but it's no struggle, thankfully, to pull back for a bit until my brain stops fighting, and instead resets into it's new lower calorie lifestyle, similar to what it has now done with regard to sugar.