Just kidding. Monday was an uneventful day, meaning that the event we had scheduled ended up with no attendees. Last week was well attended but this week, just us two organizers were there. We practiced our string instruments instead. Next week’s meeting will be promoted more thoroughly by us, and we welcome all interested readers to help us support one another in getting the sugar and starches out of our diets.

I think it may throw some people when they read me reporting that giving up sugars is easy. By that I mean that it has to be easy or it doesn’t work. The idea behind our movement is to do the easy parts and get them firmly into your daily habits, then bring in another part, which is then easy, having done the previous part.

If I told you to give up all sugars and starches, from day one, and never go back ever on pain of failure, that would seem hard, looking into the unknowable future. So I am not telling you that. I am not telling you that to do that would be easy. I didn’t do that, myself. If you think that giving up all sugars (which means added by you and added by the evil food corporations for you), that might also be too hard for you. You should keep paring back the change until it is something that you can undertake while thinking, “Ok, that will be pretty easy.” Let’s say all you are comfortable with is giving up canned and bottled soft drinks. Notice I did not say sugary drinks, because I personally refuse to believe that replacing sugar with artificial sugar is a forward move. I recall when real fats like lard and butter were replaced in our ‘good foods’ category by transfats and margarines, and now the science is in. I figure that the science just isn’t in on the new manufactured sweeteners. For myself I am not waiting for that science, no canned or bottled drinks for me at all! So back to my point, let’s say you agree that just doing that part wont be too hard for you, and you give up the sodas. After a month, you see that it was in fact really easy to do that part, so you give up boxed foods, frozen and dried. When you have done that a month you give up potatoes and pasta.  See where this leads, but the time you are three months in you are pretty much where I am, and your sugar and starch consumption is just about down to nothing, you have done what you thought was too hard to do on day one.

Another thing to consider is the occasional setback. We all have them. I gave up smoking years and years ago, but I have a cigar with friends out by the pool from time to time. It is a social thing and I CAN be a social smoker. I gave up drinking and it has not been long enough yet to allow me to be a social drinker. Maybe some day I can have a beer with my buddies, but right now that is like playing with matches in a pool of gasoline. I know my limits. You know your limits, too. When you are trying to change your life, it helps to not beat yourself to a pulp if you sneak a candy bar. You can’t hide it from yourself, even if you can hide it from the rest of the world, so when you violate your own boundaries, you pay the penalty to yourself. The smart course of action is to recommit to the plan, and don’t repeat the violation. The dumb thing to do is to quit the plan because you had a lapse of commitment. There is nothing wrong with the plan or with you, you just haven’t been in the plan long enough for it to have changed your normal way of thinking. Give it more time, the slips will be fewer and farther between, and you will succeed. You have the rest of your life to get it right.

In my honest opinion, there is no such thing as easy weight loss. So I am not losing weight. I don’t think of what I am doing as being on a diet, because I am not denying myself anything that I really want. I really wanted some granddaughter birthday cake. No problem, I am not on a diet. What I am doing is losing habits, and I am losing them the way that I learned them, gradually, a habit at a time. It’s just that easy.