Recently I’ve been hitting the sugar pretty hard. I am not one of those people that proclaims they have a sweet tooth, but there is rarely a delicious dessert treat that I would turn down. I know that eating a lot of sugar can make me feel low energy and cranky, and it certainly makes my body feel less than top notch, but I do love me some sugary goodness.
So a few weeks ago I decided to lay off sugar for a bit to break the cycle of my auto-reach for the sweets. And thus began one of the more common cycles that is wildly discouraging to all of us…
We feel bad, so we do something to make a change; things get worse for a little while (which is when most of us throw our hands up in despair and disgust and go right back to the circumstances that were bad previously), and then, finally, things get a little better.
This is not just about ditching sugar. The same thing happens when I’ve gotten out of my exercise habit. I feel bad (sluggish, cranky, aloof), so I restart my workouts and those first few days are BRUTAL. I’m even MORE tired after exercising, which makes me even MORE cranky, and I think to myself: WTF am I doing?! Get back to the couch, woman!
But, once I hit that threshold of exercising for a few days (or being off sugar and getting out of the grasp of sugar detox), things start to turn around. In both of these cases, my body feels better and my energy improves. And the thing is, I know it will happen…I just have to get past those few discouraging days when the things that felt bad actually feel worse BEFORE they can start to feel better.
What are you giving up on that, if you just stuck with it a little longer, would start to get better?
The most dangerous place is town is now my local Safeway, where they started selling Jeni’s ice cream (which I’ve only ever found/had in Chicago)!