Archive for June 12th, 2010

• Day 105: Can YOU change?

  Date: 2010.06.12 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 0

  I’ve changed, at least for now.  I never thought I could go 105 days without my favorite things: sweets.  Sometimes I think well, of course, sugar’s in everything.  But chocolate isn’t in everything.  I may have sucked down sugar that was added to cereal or peanut butter or a soup mix, but not a drop of chocolate has passed my lips for 105 days…

  I can change…

  LCD Soundsystem’s new “I Can Change” – video pulled from a recent Brooklyn concert. Their new album is This Is Happening.

• Day 104: TIPS on how to Beat Sugar Cravings!

  Date: 2010.06.12 | Category: Uncategorized | Response: 0

  

  Where have I been? Well, I haven’t been off eating candy, that’s for sure!

  It’s been a busy week on the No Candy Planet, including one special day packed with Dickensian drudgery.  I speak, of course, about filing French income taxes! (See page at left.)  I’d rather eat crusts of black bread and thin gruel for a month.

  When I do things like file my French income taxes my entire math life flashes before my eyes.  I think of my math SAT score – still a classified state and federal secret after all these years.

  There comes a point when I am filing my French income taxes (online and two hours before the midnight deadline) when I might as well be back in high school taking my math SAT.

  I’m an optimist and often start such tasks with my rose-colored glasses firmly in place.  But there came a point during the math SAT where I had to admit defeat. I began penciling in answers based on the colored-in patterns already on the page.

  As the clock ticked on my French taxes, I felt that familiar sense of defeat. I cast about for special fairy dust to sprinkle on my answers as I pressed the final button and sent them in to the FISC as the IRS is called over here.

  Will I get a letter back from the FISC addressed to my parents saying that based on my efforts, I’m not living up to my potential?  Will I have to go to special FISC summer school?

  The good news is that while I did my French taxes without the math skills that’ve eluded me my entire life – I also did them without a big fat box of Junior Mints or several Reese’s peanut butter cups.  Of course you can’t buy either of those fabulous candies in France so the point is beyond moot.

  Even better news, though I am surrounded by Brits here in the south of France, as well as actual French people, I have not succumbed to speaking Brit.  Which is why I don’t refer to it as “maths.”

  Day 104 and I am doing OK without sugary stuff.  Some days it’s surprisingly easy.  I don’t eat much junk in general although yesterday I was seized with the inexplicable desire for something really grotesque:  Pringle’s sour cream and onion potato chips. Is there even any food in that crap or are the same chemicals used to fashion the scary 1970s cylinder container the same ones used to manufacture the chips?

  

  Who knows.  But I did eat them.  With some tomato soup brought in the British foods section of a local grocery store.  Jolly good, I say!

  Here is a good video about how to beat sugar cravings.  Normally I despise anything offering “tips” on how to do anything.  I was once a correspondent on an afternoon TV show in the U.S. geared at women and every day we had about 400 segments involving “tips” on this or that.  Every woman’s magazine in the U.S. is stuffed with articles giving readers “tips.”

  Meanwhile, armed with all these supposed  tips, people are sucking down Ambien, Prozac, Lexapro and Celexa, or tearing their hair out, or jumping off buildings, or putting guns to their heads.

  I’m waiting for tips to get to their own tipping point.  However, even though this video contains the dreaded tips, I liked it anyway.