Day 79: Temptations Lurk Around Every Cannes Corner

Date: 2010.05.17 | Category: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Bonjour de Cannes!

I’m only 11 days away from three months without sweets.  A bit strange to me that friends and readers of the blog wonder if I am actually not eating sweets, as if maybe  it’s just a blogging concept.  Like I’m chowing down on French macarons (yes they are spelled like that) while typing posts about how much I miss desserts? Um, no.

I went to rent a car the other day from Nice’s best car rental agency, Elite,  and my friend Stephane who runs it, saw me eating from a bag while he was writing up my reservation.  ”I thought you were not eating candy?” he said. (When you’re on Facebook, spies are everywhere.)

I showed Stephane that there were only almonds and raisins in the bag.  Raisins actually seems like cheating but only for some crazy-ass purist who doesn’t want a drop of natural sugar or processed sugar in her body.  I’m still just avoiding candy and all desserts.  That’s hard enough, bitches.

So the point is – I am doing what I set out to do on Feb. 28, 2010.  Sometimes it seems almost easy, meaning I don’t crave sweets a lot or feel too deprived.  But just when I start to smug up and think I have this beating-candy thing down — I turn a corner, as I did yesterday in Cannes, and first see two girls eating ice cream cones.  Then I walk by the above boulangerie and see the macarons.

I get hit hard and immediately feel – I want some of that and I want it now and how can I continue not to have the stuff I want?

But the secret for me seems to be… about five minutes after I turn away from looking at the macarons and the girls with the ice cream cones are long gone, I forget about my jonesing and it passes.

Sounds too easy, true.  And I don’t know about you, but the minute I get complacent and think I have everything under control, boom comes the big sledgehammer in the sky to take me down a peg.

But… it keeps me on my hooves.

Ta,

Day 78: Jennifer Hudson Inspires Us!

Date: 2010.05.16 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Talking to Jennifer Hudson today at a seaside restaurant in Cannes was more than just another celebrity interview.  It was uplifting. Jennifer is only 28, she’s already won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Dreamgirls, had a baby last year and in two weeks will start the acting challenge of a lifetime:  playing Nelson Mandela’s ex-wife Winnie, in Winnie.

She also lost a ton of weight for the new movie because the filmmakers asked her to, but she said she didn’t take it personally.  I told her about trying to give up candy and desserts for a year (78 days so far!) and she was all for it, except she said she could never do it.

Jennifer lost all her weight on WeightWatchers but she’s now their spokeswoman and told me the company won’t let her say how much she lost.  I’m guessing about 40 pounds. She said she loves the WeightWatchers “points” system because she gets to eat enough and not feel hungry.

We bonded over diet talk, what a girl cliche I know.  I told her I was glad she didn’t do the Beyonce and Gwyneth “master cleanse” that is so trendy and sort of scary, I think.

Jennifer is one of the smart stars.  She talks to you as if you’re a friend; she’s funny and self-deprecating.  She’s TALL too;  at 5’9″ she was wearing four-inch stilettos that made her tower over me – and I’m 5’8″.  She says everyone is always amazed at how tall she is.  She looked like a supermodel today with her height and weight loss.

So she’s not arrogant – but like a lot of truly talented people, you sense why she’s a star. From what I’ve seen over the years, it  takes more than just talent.  It takes ambition, a steely competitive drive and the desire to master things.  I’ve noticed big stars don’t ever seem to have much self-pity, even when bad things happen to them.  So many other people just give in.

Jennifer’s mother, brother, and nephew were killed in a shooting in 2008 and she stayed out of the spotlight for three months afterwards. Her estranged brother-in-law was been charged with their murders.

But then she had a baby – and now she’s learning a Xhosa tribal accent to play Winnie Mandela. She’s working with a Xhosa dialect coach.  She says she’s nervous, but you feel a calmness and determination radiating from her.   Love people who get right back up on the horse and don’t hesitate to start jumping again – first by having a baby, then by changing her body – and now portraying Winnie Mandela.

Do we wish Jennifer Hudson the best?

We do!

Ta,

Day 76: We Get No Love from Shia LaBeouf

Date: 2010.05.15 | Category: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

In the new film “Wall Street:  Money Never Sleeps,” Shia LaBeouf’s character brings down one of the film’s bad guys by planting some not-so-flattering information about him on a small blog…

Hmmm, what a good idea.

Anyway, Without Candy has another packed schedule as of today but wanted to bring some good news before she gets into why Shia LaBeouf is not her favorite new person.

Yesterday was so busy I didn’t think of sweets even once and the only temptation came at midnight at a fabulous, torch-lit villa up in the hills above Cannes and was just a tiny cup filled with sorbet and was easy to turn down.

Here was my day leading up to that sorbet in Cannes:

11 a.m. – Outdoor press conference for “Wall Street 2.”  Michael Douglas gamely fields a question from a reporter (not me!) congratulating him for “looking good” at 65 and asking “is it hard to get roles in Hollywood as a mature actor?”

Ugh.  Is there a worse word in the English language than “mature” once you’re over 40? Think not.

Shia LeBeauf was at the presser as well, looking serious and saying he had been intimidated by the “all-star cast” of Wall Street when they started shooting.  He was flanked by his co-star in the film, Carey Mulligan, with whom he is having a romance. Lucky her.

12 – 2 p.m. – Reporting, filing stories and trying to avoid this one reporter with whom I worked with in the late 1980s (oh, does that make me mature?) and who I have run into about 10 times already and who I run into more than anyone I’ve ever worked with.

2:00 p.m. – Learn I am assigned to the evening’s black-tie world premiere of “Wall Street 2″ and the after-party.  Yes, the entertainment reporting trade is like this. On the fly. Don’t ask. I was in black pants, which you cannot wear on the red carpet leading up to the Palais and the Grand Theatre Lumière when attending a world premiere.  They will stop you in line if they see you and expel you.

2:01 p.m. – Panic. Do I have time to drive back to Nice to get one of my black dresses and return in time to gather at the Hotel Majestic bar prior to the movie screening?  No.  But figure I have enough time to buy one on the Rue d’Antibes a block from the Palais at a shop like Zara.

2:15 p.m. – Set off for Zara.  Cell phone rings, am assigned a quick story to write and have to return to Palais.

4:00 p.m. – Clock is ticking but am confident dress will be easy to buy. I go buy a Big Mac to steel myself for looonngggg evening.

4:30 p.m – Head into Zara.  Tell them I need a black dress for tonight.  Incredibly, they have only a few weird, unflattering, awful dresses.

4:40 p.m. – Go to another boutique.  Slight panic.  If I don’t buy a dress and be at the Majestic Hotel by 5:30 p.m. – I miss the premiere and the after-party and editors will not be happy.

4:41 p.m. – Nice salesgirl brings me dresses designed for someone slightly slimmer than Gisele Bundchen.  Trying to pull dress down over me in tiny trying-on booth the size of a postage stamp.  Hate my life.  Know this will engender no sympathy.

4:50 p.m. – Exit second boutique in full panic.  Decide I am too mature for this crap and wish I could skip tonight and just go catch some screening with a friend and wear my flip-flops.

4:55 p.m. – Enter the Caroll boutique and find Catherine, mon ange. Catherine(below, on the right) sizes up my crisis in 30 seconds and produces 4 quite pretty dresses, gets me to a cabin, shows me how she would tie the belt on one and fusses over me as if I were Sharon Stone.

5:10 p.m. – Still wearing the dress (on sale for about $100) after Catherine cuts the tags, I thank her profusely.

5:30 p.m. – Make it to the Majestic for drinks with the Grey Goose reps who are sponsoring the premiere and who are allowing me and two other reporters what is called “access” in the trade.

6:30 p.m. – Led by Grey Goose rep, we make our way out of the Majestic and get caught up in a soccer-like crowd melee with about 200 other people trying to cross the Croisette. It’s a surreal moment, our little group pressed against a line of French cops holding hands to keep the crowd which is pushing HARD. One woman gets sick or claustrophobic and cops yell “Malaise!” and pull her from the crowd.  I try not to topple over.  The Grey Goose rep remains unflappable.

7:00 p.m. – We walk up the red carpet up to the Palais.  Even in a group, it’s always humbling to stroll past the hundreds of paparazzi poised on the steps who ARE NOT WAITING FOR YOU. Bump into Ellen Barkin at the top of the stairs. She’s very thin and friendly.  Brush by Harvey Weinstein.

7:30 p.m. – We are seated and then the director Oliver Stone, Michael Douglas, Josh Brolin, Carey Mulligan and Shia LeBeauf walk to their special seats as the audience stands and applauds.

8:15 – 10:30 p.m. – Watch movie.  It’s OK and interesting. Not great. Michael Douglas is good.  And I don’t understand why gorgeous, strong-jawed Josh Brolin is not a superstar.

11 p.m. – Hustled into a van to go to “secret” location for the after party.  We wend our way through the hills above Cannes. The van is quiet as everyone, heads bent, remains in constant contact with their own personal control towers i.e. BlackBerries.

11:10 p.m. – I’m tired but confident I’ll achieve my aim at the party, which is to get some quotes from the stars, and then call it a night.

11:30 p.m. – We arrive at the gate of gorgeous Chateau Fayeres, looming on a hill at the end of a torch-lit driveway. The villa is alight with candles and torches; people are wandering between small white tents and an enormous pool.  It all looks vaguely Anne Rice.  ”Oh, look,” I tell one of the Grey Goose reps, pointing at a torch-lit area off the pool. “They’re sacrificing virgins.”

Midnight – I make my first approach, to Michael Douglas. It’s never the most fun thing in the world to walk up to a famous person and just start asking them questions.  I’d rather talk to a cop, or a drug dealer, or a serial killer – in my other life as a hard news reporter. It’s been said before but nobody believes that the celebrity beat is the trickiest.

12:01 a.m. – Douglas the pro, looking eerily like his father Kirk, is affable, genial – telling me his career has been all about “surfing the waves as they go up and down.”

12:10 a.m. – Oliver Stone, another showbiz lifer, tells me he almost didn’t want to make “Wall Street 2″ when Douglas approached him in 2007. Then the 2008 financial crisis hit – and Stone realized he had a golden opportunity.  He also spoke at length about how Shia La Beouf and Carey Mulligan fell in love on the set. Great!

12:20 a.m. – Shia is sitting at a table eating from the buffet (smoked salmon, shrimp, brown spicy rice, les petits farcis, a local Nice specialty) and probably indulging in some of the amazing vodka cocktails designed by the resident mixmaster.

12:21 a.m. – I get a vibe that it might be better to send a Grey Goose rep over to request a quick interview with Shia and she says no problem.

12:22 a.m. – Shia says no.

12:23 a.m. – Thwarted, I plan my next move.  Can I get to his girlfriend Carey Mulligan? Will Shia loosen up after a few more vodka cocktails made with lemons from nearby lemon capital Menton?

12:30 a.m.:  Non, and non, as it turns out.

1:10 a.m. – Shia has taken off his tuxedo jacket and is holding court all over.  Salsa music is playing on the loudspeakers.  A few people are dancing.  The palm trees sway in the cool air. Heat lamps positioned around the pool keep us warm.

1: 11 a.m. – There’s a wide open space around Shia. I move in, not so stealthily.  I start by introducing myself.  Shia holds up his arms as if to shield himself.  ”You’re a reporter?” he says, seemingly appalled.  ”Yes,” I say. “And Michael Douglas and Oliver Stone had such great things to say about your performance I wanted to be sure to talk to you.”

1:11 a.m. plus 10 seconds:  Shia LaBeouf and I both wait to see if he will get his head out from up his own ass but no such luck. “Oh, no, I can’t,” Shia says.  He repeats, “I just can’t. I just can’t.”

1:12 a.m. – Shia turns his back to me and hugs a well-wisher and hugs him. I stand there, starkly.  The celebrity reporting trade means you always get to remember what it’s like to be 13. No matter how mature you are.

1:13 a.m. – I walk away and sit by the pool. Trying not to smolder.

1:20 a.m. – De-smoldered, pick up a lemon vodka cocktail and relax. Word going around the party is how beautiful Diane Lane looks sitting next to her husband Josh Brolin.  Her hair is piled high in a brown beehive that looks great.

Back to Shia. He’s only 23.  He’s already been acting for half his life and he starts “Transformers 3″ on Tuesday.  Has a fantastic career ahead of him.

Do we wish him well?

No comment.  :)

Ta,

Day 75: Down and Out in Cannes?

Date: 2010.05.13 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

Was I holding court at the elegant Carlton Hotel tonight, a highball in one hand and a sidecar in another, watching as a tuxedo-ed Pierce Brosnan look-a-like leaned in to hang on my every word?

Close.  It was a party of one on a bench on the Croisette just down from the Carlton with a takeout sandwich and a bottle of water from a favorite Lebanese stand near the Cannes train station.  But hey, there were 10 minutes of fireworks above the bay at 10 p.m.!

I only had a few minutes in between investigative journalism opportunities.

Someone get me rewrite…

Ta,

Day 74: A Year Without Candy Goes to Cannes

Date: 2010.05.12 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

I was among the many who had a tough time getting to today’s opening of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival. Last week’s freakish storm with 18-foot waves that battered restaurants along the Cannes seafront capped off months of annoying English-type weather on the Cote d’Azur. Even worse, the remains of the volcanic ash cloud from Iceland re-wafted over Europe this past weekend, closing Nice Airport for a day and disrupting flights from all over.

One Los Angeles film critic had to take two planes, two trains and a bus to get here. Paging John Candy! Other friends of mine reported 10 to 12 hour flights from JFK (usually takes only seven to eight hours) because the planes had to “detour” around the volcash. Leslie Nielsen on line one!

I only had to drive the 22 miles west from Nice to Cannes, yet I inexplicably zoned out and drove right past the Cannes exit. Saw a bit of scenic Frejus before turning around and heading back to Cannes. Good thing I didn’t space completely and drive all the way to Ikea in Toulon. (Though the cafeteria there does serve a delicious Swedish lunch.) If this is Wednesday, it must be Belgium?

But we are reporters in the timeless war zone of the Cannes Film Festival and we will fight our way to the front (the Palais), pick up our badges and prepare to do battle. I’ve already walked into the wrong queue twice in a scant two hours, the familiar and scornful Non, madame, pas ici dripping from the lips of the army of Cannes gatekeepers.

And after a lengthy respite from the rigors of entertainment reporting (and it is a snakepit) I feel myself adapting with frightening swiftness. I, too, am buzzing around the Palais and the Croisette with the same air of being terribly busy and officious self-importance.

However, the real me is less introspective. Here’s what’s on my mind on Day One:

1. Tim Burton reminds me of Dolly Parton. They both have such an obviously contrived look. Dolly, actually one of the most talented songwriters and gifted performers on the planet, will not, no matter what, give up her wigs and garish makeup and see-through stiletto heels. Burton, who’s the Cannes jury president this year, looks as if he must have a stylist with him at all times to maintain his wildly frizzy hair and two-day old growth of beard so everyone knows he is no poseur but a true artiste.

2. I’m already missing the megawattage of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, festival mainstays, who aren’t coming this year and thus making my job harder. Shia LeBeauf and Carey Mulligan are the new It Couple but I know Brangelina and they are no Brangelina.

3. I came armed today with almonds and raisins and water. But there is a Haagen-Dazs stand directly opposite the Palais where every other year I’ve enjoyed a scoop of pralines and cream. It does give a certain frisson of energy every day. Can almonds and raisins take its place? Hope so…..

Day 72: My Friend Can’t Read My Blog Because of the Pictures!

Date: 2010.05.10 | Category: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Oops!   A major flaw has been discovered in My Year Without Candy.  My friend M. (haven’t asked her yet if I can ID her) told me today she can’t look at my blog because there are so many pictures of candy and desserts!   M. has been off almost ALL sugar for more than a year and a half or maybe even two years.

But because sugar is a major trigger for her, the pictures I post (repeatedly, I’m afraid) of the foodstuff that for the sake of this one post dare not speak its name are too dangerous to look at. So one less reader!

I’ve placed the above apple in this post in honor of M.  Maybe she’ll at least be able to read this post…

It’s true, my fabulous friend Andi, the reknowned Parisian illustratrice, who I already wrote about here, told me that she’s not even a sweetfreak but my blog sometimes made her go out and buy some c—y.

So – my ambivalence is laid bare.  I sort of hoped originally that I’d become an anti-sugar crusader, a Piped Piper of renouncing c—y and d—ert.   But my mixed emotions have obviously resulted in a mixed message blog.  Is c—y like a bad boyfriend I can’t give up?

Am I like porn star Jenna Jameson returning to Tito Ortiz after he allegedly beat her ass (yes I read TMZ when I should be reading Proust) and saying they’re going to work it out?

But what can you do?  It’s how I feel.  For me, talking about sweet things and posting images of them seem to be the next best thing to eating them.

So maybe that makes me a pretender and I won’t stay the course the way M. has.  She also lost 40 pounds by the way and looks fantastic.

M. is going to be the subject of an upcoming interview here about how one day she was in the throes of a sugar and eating addiction and the next day went home and threw every bad thing out of her house and just white-knuckled it into abstinence.

My shero!

Humbly,

Day 70/71: A Sugar-Free Mother’s Day

Date: 2010.05.08 | Category: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

I’m resisting the temptation to write anything except a factual post today about my mother (on the far left, with her sisters) – and my memories stemming from our mutual love of sweet things. We had different tastes; she loved dark chocolate, like a European.  I’m a milk chocolate fan.

The fact that she died in 2008 looms over writing about her but this is a no-sentiment zone today. I’m dispensing with the sugary stuff in my head as I have in my life.

Also, a shout-out to Maria Shriver whose lovely eulogy to her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who died almost a year after my mother, made my friends realize there was someone else in the world over the age of 2 who still called her mother “Mummy.”  It’s a New England thing.

My mother, Louise, was no super-mother like Eunice Shriver but she was no slouch. She was a Vassar graduate, a reporter for newspapers and UPI and had her own radio show. But she had kids and eventually chose a more mother-friendly career in teaching.  She didn’t have the temperament for a major-league career and she knew it.  She liked her home, plants, cooking, reading and traveling.

Also, she was tough and took no prisoners, which makes it hard to build a career, with all its requisite ring-kissing.  One day pretty late in life when she was mad at me about something, she growled like a prizefighter,  ”I’m not going to take this lying down.”

My mother loved sweets but, unlike me, in moderation. She didn’t have an addictive personality.  She rarely had a glass of wine except when she threw her little dinner parties.

We also had almost nothing in our medicine cabinet except aspirin. My mother was rarely sick so we never even had that over-the-counter stuff other people have, like Pepto-Bismol, or nighttime “cold relief” medicine.

My mother’s only addiction was reading, which she did in an armchair in the living room. It was the last thing I got rid of in her house after she died; it had an imprint of her upper body on the left side of the chair.

My grandmother also loved candy – in moderation.  However, it was clear early on I was not Ms. Moderate – at least with sweets.

One of my earliest memories is of riding my bike to to buy only-in-New England candies like Necco Wafers, Sky Bars and Boyle’s Mallo Cups.

My mother figured out early that I liked candy a bit too much.  Ours was not a household where you could put out a dish of Brach’s milk chocolate stars in the living room and hope there’d be any left by nightfall.

So my mother would buy candy for the family – and hide the bags from me because she knew I’d gobble the contents right up.  I’d hunt for them to no avail.

It’s a fact is that when your mother dies, that’s the end of eating her desserts.  I’ve made some of them from her recipes but it’s like when I blow out my own hair instead of going to a hairdresser.  It’s never quite as good.

She made excellent lemon meringue pie with a creamy, not Jello-y, filling that I have never seen made by anyone but her.  I don’t even like regular lemon meringue pie.

The cake I asked her for most often was a very simple vanilla cake with mocha icing.  We had a cake cookbook with pictures of novelty cakes – a hat cake, an igloo cake etc. – and I chose one every year for her to bake on my birthday.

She made excellent chocolate chip cookies with toffee bits.  She made a blueberry pie with blueberries she and her friend Charlene picked at a nearby park.

She also had the simplest fudge recipe in the galaxy – which was made by mixing white sugar, butter, unsweetened baking chocolate, milk and a dollop of vanilla in a saucepan on a stove.  Then she’d pour the mixture into a glass pie dish and it would harden.

I preferred downing it while it was simmering on the stovetop. In fact I have a scar (fudge war wound) on my hand below my left thumb from where a scalding spoonful dripped down.

She wasn’t fanatical about sweets but loved dark chocolate peppermint patties and nonpareils (at left.)

She spent the last months of her life in a nursing home, the result of a bad fall that accelerated the personality-altering dementia I didn’t even realize she had.

I’d buy her favorite dark chocolate molasses chips down the street from the nursing home in our hometown at Stowaway Sweets, a candy shop which counted Katharine Hepburn among its clients.

Very strangely, my mother and I had a lot of fun at the nursing home – especially during mealtime. This makes no sense, because it’s supposed to be depressing to see your strong, independent mother rendered relatively helpless and drugged up.

I think it was because she was so funny.  She never lost her killer sense of humor and never forgot who I was (I specifically asked her not to.)  Nor did she lose her lumberjack-style appetite, at least around me, which always cracked me up because she was so small compared to me.

We’d joke together in the dining room and I’d marvel at how much food she’d put away – especially dessert. Three weeks before she died she’d always ask me to get her a second cup of the strawberry ice cream at dinner and finish every last trace of it.  I’d peer inside the bare cup after she was done and look at her incredulously.

I rarely saw other nursing home residents with their relatives but when they were there, they looked grim and ignored me and my mother.  I understood, but it was almost as if we were going against the rules of life by joking and laughing, like if your parent or spouse is in a nursing home you have to be morose.

As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that when it came to the end, my mother was different from me.  There was something salty she loved even more than candy.

During my last visit with her, before I had to return to France, we talked about everything. She had a kind of dementia that is increasingly common; she was both very out of it, declining rapidly, and yet sometimes knew exactly what was going on.

At one point, I told her that it was OK if she wanted to go. She didn’t have to stay on my account or anyone else’s if she didn’t want to. I knew it wasn’t any life for her.  I also knew that while she was very much her own person, she sometimes relied on me for what she called “sensible advice.”

She was not someone who liked being trapped.  Once we were on a boring, rainy vacation with friends of hers in Canada.  My mother wasn’t having a good time so she cut the trip short by taking me and jumping on a plane to go back home. She didn’t think twice or worry about how it might look.

So I told her that she could do whatever she wanted – but I let her know there was a helicopter waiting on the roof of the nursing home to take her away when she was ready.

This is also factual. I could see the helicopter on the roof very clearly in my mind.  I told her the helicopter would be loaded with Cheez-Its, which in fact were her favorite food.  Even more than the sweet stuff.

Day 69: Fake It Till You Make It?

Date: 2010.05.07 | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

I hit upon another scheme in my ongoing David (me) versus Goliath (the candy and dessert industrial-complex) on the plane back from Singapore last week when the flight attendant offered me an after-dinner dish of chocolates.

“No thanks,” I told her breezily. “I don’t care for sweets.”

For a few moments I reveled in my new fake identity – someone for whom chocolate holds no interest.   (I’ve met a few of these people, rare birds who profess not to have sweet teeth, and some of them may in fact be telling the truth.)

I even felt smug for a minute – until I remembered I was lying to the flight attendant and am in fact not a person who doesn’t like chocolate.

But I felt a power and energy radiating back from what I projected onto the flight attendant.  I bought myself a shot of superiority by putting my lie onto her.  “Lie” of course sounds so negative in this situation – and it’s possible, isn’t it, that by the very act of lying I could one day turn into a person who doesn’t like chocolate.

Does faking it work when you’re trying to give up sugar?  Does it work in life, too?  I say yes – and no.

I’m a big fan of being authentic, although I’m all too aware it may just be a nice label for someone who’d rather be just be silly and have fun than exercise a lot of tiresome self-discipline.

As my life has gone on, I’ve learned the value of being one of those people who puts on their game face every morning and tells the world they are doing just great. Whether they are or not.

It’s too easy to call it phony.  It’s more complicated and, I think, strategic than that. The energy they get from convincing other people (and themselves) they got it goin’ on and all is OK make their success and sanguinity real. And in the competition of life, you’ve got to watch out for these people because when you believe their game, you start to doubt yours.

Also, these people accomplish a lot. And probably aren’t sugar addicts.

I’m not talking about run-of-the-mill positive people.  I mean the real masters, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who literally create their environment by sheer force of will and refuse to be mere reactors in life like the rest of us.

According to the “addictionary,” the phrase “fake it till you make it” comes from the 12-step program where newcomers are advised to act “as if” when trying to succeed at new, healthier behaviors.   Ideally, if you adhere in language and action to what you want to be,  you eventually morph into that which you strive to be.

As Yoda said: “Do or do not… there is no try.”

I know someone (midway between acquaintance and friend) who has had a tremendous amount of success in her field, after having a very tough childhood.  I haven’t spoken to her lately but she is another master of the art – if more subtle than Schwarzenegger and not as well-known.

It wasn’t possible to have a conversation with her in which she allowed that her life was anything but fantastic.  That may sound obnoxious and she is not at all obnoxious. She’s a great person with excellent values. She is certainly nicer than I am.

But I could never get to know her except on a very superficial level because I’d always run into this wall of how great she was doing.

I will never forget one day more than five years ago when we were talking on the phone and she was on the verge of some truly amazing success.

She began the conversation in a low, worried voice that was not at all like her.

“I am so freaked out,” she said.

I perked right up when I heard that.  She’s finally cracked a bit, I thought.  We’re going to bond over some problem she’s having.  The balance of power will be even between us.

“What’s going on?” I asked, hopefully.

She sighed.

“I just can’t believe how many great things are happening to me,” she said. “I’m so blessed but it’s freaking me out.”

Yep. You guessed it.

I got taken once again.

I’m sick of being so fucking authentic.

Ta,

Day 67: My Latest Scheme to Combat Sugar Cravings

Date: 2010.05.04 | Category: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

While in Singapore last week, I ditched high-priced Orchard Road for the delights of Mustafa, a Walmart-meets-Costco located in the funky (hate that word) Little India section of the city. Let’s put it this way, you could spend several days in the watch section alone.

Watches, schmatches.  (Wait, does that rhyme or not?)

Anyway, all I bought in Mustafa was incredibly boring stuff like vitamins and Tiger Balm. I was very excited to spot a bottle labeled with the very exotic name “Kordel’s Sugar Control” – and snapped up two.  I am an incurable optimist and always convinced that the solution to my problem du jour is right around the corner.

The bottle says: “Kordel’s Sugar Control contains the effective combination of two patented organic minerals, ChromeMate® and OptiZinc® and co-nutrients for normalise glucose metabolism.”

I went through a chromium phase ages ago – that’s like Cure for Sugar Addiction 101. I don’t remember it making a huge difference although maybe I didn’t take it for long enough.  I have a friend down the road in Antibes who swears by some chromium and something concoction.

I popped a Sugar Control tablet today.  We’ll see if I start craving brussel sprouts tomorrow.  In the meantime here’s an article about chromium and sugar addiction from Livestrong.com that you can read about it here.

Day 66: Back from the Temptations of the Exotic East

Date: 2010.05.03 | Category: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

This morning, back in France, I made myself get on the scale.  Usually I only use my scale when I think I’m losing weight, the better to motivate myself. If I’ve eaten a lot and gained weight, I avoid the scale which allows me to not face reality.

However, I’m now more into confronting reality whenever possible – and then taking action. Painful at first, then the action part helps relieve whatever bad news I had to face.  This morning, I expected the worst.  And it was not because I succumbed to the incredible temptations in Singapore.

I wasn’t blogging much while I was there because I needed to conserve all my energy to resist the incredible number of American-style desserts that are EVERYWHERE there.

Anyway, I lost half a pound during a week of zero exercise and constant eating in Singapore.  WTF?  At home I don’t eat a lot and am an avid hiker, biker, kayaker etc. and there are still weeks when I inexplicably gain weight or can’t lose it.  Is there something in the water in Singapore?

As some readers know, I ate a banana tempura one night (banana fried in batter with no sugar) in Singapore but was persuaded to dip a millimeter of the banana in a green sweet sauce.  One reader called that a slip so massive that I should restart my entire Year Without Candy.  I don’t think so.

Other than that, I had nothing sweet. It was especially difficult because everyone you meet in Singapore eats heartily of the fantastic local fare.  Then they load up on dessert – and don’t seem to gain a pound!  Again, the water??

I had lunch with two local friends at PS Cafe one day.  Afterward we walked over to this long bar where huge cakes and pies were displayed and they both ordered some.  The desserts were served as huge hunks on their plates. Both these people are Singoporean and sylph-like.

Below are some photos of the PS Cafe desserts:

It was bad enough that so many local restaurants serve mouthwatering and super-size versions of the kind of desserts you find at one of my favorite places: an American bake sale.

Add that to all the American coffee bar and dessert chains – Mrs. Fields Cookies, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Starbucks (with its blowout pastries) and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf etc. and then TRIPLE that with all sorts of innovative little Singaporean dessert places pictured below.  My new goal:  return to Singapore when/if I go back on desserts!