sugar is poison

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Believe it or not, I chose the least scary link to present here. I have never been that big on sugar, thank goodness, but I have a soft spot for Ben and Jerry's Cherry Garcia ice cream and ginger ale... not together... and these had to be erased from my life almost completely if I was to stand a chance to get to size six and to stay size six. I got down to it over a year ago, and have stayed down to it since. So sugar has to be rare around here.

I find lately, since upping the thyroid and nixing the estrogen, that I'm getting cravings for sugar betimes... and I just had a damn hot flash. I was SO hoping that taking the barest minimum amount of estrogen and titrating down off it would let me off the hook for another round of this shit, but it's not looking good.

Anyway, I eat, in total, a bowl of bite-sized shredded wheat with psyllium hulls and banana and/or blueberries, half a baked boneless skinless chicken breast with string beans, and a blueberry smoothie, sometimes with brandy in it, or a logger martini, every day. This rarely varies. I'd vary it, except it is too frickin' hard to find clean food around here. I had to work my butt off to find this much.

It's always string beans because they're the only frozen vegetables that are JUST the vegetable and cheap... and I can only do fresh vegetables when they are on super duper sale because they are OUTRAGEOUSLY expensive here. A bell pepper, ONE bell pepper costs $4.00. Whenever I find a good steak on really good sale, I will buy one and an onion to sauté with it, but, well, you know, that's not very damn often. Same thing with the blueberries. Frozen. I can get a three-pound bag of them for $11.00 and they are the absolute healthiest fruit happening. Most bang for my no bucks.

I used to switch off between having cereal in the morning and having whole grain bread and extra-sharp cheddar cheese, but the whole grain bread is now over $4.00 a loaf in the CHEAP place and $6.19 a loaf nearby. I usually can get bite-sized shredded wheat for about $2.00 a box, because it's almost always on sale, or the store brand kind is. Unfortunately, I tasted their vanilla almond flavor one time and went batshit crazy for it. That has sugar in it. The regular shredded wheat is just shredded wheat... nothing else... but, damn, that vanilla almond thing is SO tasty. So I splurge and buy a box of it and put a few little biscuits of it in with the regular stuff every "morning" so as not to feel too deprived. Usually I get my cheddar anyway so I can have something to nibble if I get too hungry.

I take extra vitamin D, vitamin C, vitamin B12, a couple multi-vitamin/mineral pills and flaxseed oil every single day to make sure I'm getting everything I need that I'm not eating, and I gotta have most of that extra anyway. If I don't do this, I feel like total crap. No oomph. And worse.

I drink extremely strong coffee, Peet's, with half and half in it, and smoke between four and eight cigarettes a day. I take a fancy antihistamine, because I'm allergic to my house, and two baby aspirin, because everyone my age is supposed to, every day.

I almost always feel the most like going out tromping when it's too rainy and miserable to do it. When it's sunny, I feel the most like puttering, and so I do.

I have to TRY to incorporate a little booze into my day because a little of that is good for people my age too, and because I turn into the cheapest date in California if I don't keep somewhat in practice. Thing is: I forget to buy booze all the time. So I only get any when I've thought of it and the store nearby has Korbel brandy on sale. This is NOT often. But they had the huge jugs on sale for $14.00 a couple weeks ago, when I'd only gone to look for the name of a booze I'd forgotten, and, well, hell, gotta do that. So I did.

Which brings me to the POINT here.

I have been having myself a hot logger martini every evening for a couple weeks now, and that involves a pinch of sugar... at least it does for me.... Logger martini:

coffee
milk or half and half, or both
sugar to taste
vanilla
in yer favorite mug
hot or over ice
all ingredients except brandy optional
short form: bottled cold frappucino, chug off a third and pour in the brandy

This is the way loggers get in their happy hours after work when the show has been thirty dirt road miles and twenty highway miles from home, or the bar, whichever applies. It's to the point where it's cheaper to just make it in the morning and put it in a thermos, but sometimes that doesn't quite get you all the way home, or to the bar, whichever. This means a pitstop for the Starbuck's shit. I know ALL about loggers.

This nightly logger martini thing, while nostalgic, and soothing, is creating major emotional conflict at the grocery store when I'm staring at my coveted Vanilla Almond Shredded Wheat box.

Sugar is poison, and I'm not kidding about this size six thing, and I am SO not kidding about being healthy enough to function as well as possible for as long as possible. So all I can say is that it is at LEAST a mercy those big jugs of Korbel don't go on sale like that very often. Sheesh. This is about Shakespearean by now.

The MAJOR reason my eating has to be this circumscribed is because they put sugar, usually high fructose corn syrup, in EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING available to purchase at the store. They put it in canned vegetables. I shit you not. They put it in crackers and bread and many frozen things—in addition to the outrageous amounts of SALT—and certainly EVERY convenience food, salad dressing, soup, EVERYTHING! I think I saw the fucking produce manager sprinkling sugar on those four-dollar peppers! Jesus Christ on a crutch! Are you still wondering why everyone is dropping from diabetes or pancreatic cancer or heart disease? Are you one of those assholes who wonders why poor people are always fat people?

All the food is POISONED with sugar and salt and bad fats and chemicals that give you no nutrients and bloat you up like a damn hippo. If you are rich you can avoid the WORST of this, get food that is still food. Otherwise, work yer damn butt off, and get some high-powered cheaters to read those labels, to find something actually edible, man. DO IT! Not what THEY call "edible". Real food. They are trying to kill us!
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