No sugar tonight in my coffee
No sugar tonight in my tea
No sugar to stand beside me
No sugar to run with me

 — The Guess Who

My colleague Randy and I were talking on New Year’s Eve this year. We shared well wishes, conducted a little work, expressed our gratitude for our very tenured relationship, and voiced some aspirations for the New Year. Randy is my editor and we are going to finish some of my drafted books in 2020 after a hiatus from book writing since 2008. Randy also has a book of his own to finish and publish.

After much happy talk, I shared with Randy my personal goal of needing to focus on my eating habits.

After losing weight in 2019 and finding my muscles and stamina again, I shared that this healthy-self was really enjoying all the adventure and athletic challenges I experienced on my ski/island vacation in December. And yet the photos of me climbing rock walls, swimming in waterfalls, riding a horse, driving an ATV, surfing and just grinning at the camera show a happy, well-padded, woman in her 61st year of life. I blurted out to my friend/colleague/confessor, Randy, ‘I am still f@$%#*!king fat!’ He laughed.

I admitted that I had started to eat sugar again around Halloween, then into the Thanksgiving celebration, and well into Christmas; right up to New Year’s Eve. I had gained back some of the lost weight. My resolution was to start the New Year with a more thoughtful approach to eating and to banish the sugar demon back to his/her cave.

He too confessed an attraction/addiction to sugar. He shared that when he picks up a cookie that he is already thinking that the one in his hand will not satisfy his need for sugar and has plans for a second one before the first has passed through his lips.

Does anyone else share our attraction to sugar (or something else)?

If Randy and I could be moderate in our consumption of this substance that comes in many forms….maybe we could have a relationship with our sugar monsters. His gateway sugar-drug is cookies — mine is cake and ice cream. They are not our friends.

So, Randy and I confessed and committed to each other that we would be breaking up with sugar (once again) in the New Year.

There are many song lyrics about ‘Breaking up being hard to do’ But I am ready to kick this sugar friend to the curb, one more time.

Are there any habits that you will be letting go of as you enter a new decade?

Any new habits or commitments that you will be embracing as we enter a leap year with big round numbers?

Randy and I will probably always dance with our sugar friend (off and on) but it was nice to share the mutual weakness and commit to a renewed strength with a friend, today! I am discovering that to be vulnerable is a growing edge that will make the future bright.

With the new day comes new strength and new thoughts.

— Eleanor Roosevelt

 

Leslie