Went to Nashville, and it turns out that for us this place is far off the sugar-free reservation. We ate what we wanted, and paid attention to the reasonable choices that were available to us. We had beans and rice at a Mexican restaurant, we had desert after our anniversary dinner. I ate potatoes of every kind, but mostly the french fried kind. We ate like we used to with two big exceptions. We never had a soda of any kind, and we ate no breads.

It is important when you are just changing your eating habits that you are not hard on yourself when you decide to have a sweet treat. It is no failure to decide that after your anniversary dinner you can have a sweet dish with candles, chocolate mousse, crunched up heath bars and a brownie. Then, when it’s too sweet to finish, you are free to think that some sweet deserts are only for the sweet-addicted. Our palate has now shifted to more asian semi-sweet deserts, or something lightly sweetened like a tiramisu.

Personally, I do not feel as though I have suffered a setback of any kind. Far from home and not able to cook for yourself is a serious limit on changing habits. We didn’t want to spend any time looking for special menu restaurants, we wanted to see the sights. It was easy to have water with every meal, and that was how I stayed on my plan. My one small thing is really no sweetened sodas, and I was true to that.

It was a little bit harder to walk past all of the honky-tonks and pass up all the great parties that were going on than it was to not drink a coke with every meal. Nashville is a great place to visit, and the choices that you make are all in the moment. As you walk on the street it would be an easy thing to decide to do something you wouldn’t normally do. Making that decision is not any kind of defeat, but it is something that you will feel. Having that desert will make you a little bit uncomfortable, physically. You might sweat a little bit. You might feel a little bit of inflammation. The nice thing is that as a non-sugar addict, you can take refuge in the knowledge that what you are feeling is fleeting. In just a day your chemistry will be back in balance, your gastric system is not reset to expect the flood of sugar at every meal.

If your life were lived on the road, say you drive for a living, it may be very difficult to live sugar and starch free. In that case you might have to find ways to eat that are a little bit more work. For a vacationer, since the change is short-lived, it is simpler to just stick to the reservation for the easy things like drinks, and to go ahead and eat the foods that are readily available. I made no deals with myself to allow the excesses. I just rested easy in the knowledge that what I was doing WAS part of the plan. Eating well every day gives me the cushion to eat what I have to when I have to. NO HARM NO FOUL.

I am glad to be back, I missed writing, too.