So last summer I went on a gluten-free/sugar-free/sugar-substitute-free diet and started losing weight — whether I needed to or not. But it actually (sort of) worked out well. My sugar cravings have gone way down — and I can easily make do when they try to sneak back in again. There is a lot to be said about breaking a piece of Ghirardelli’s 100% cocoa unsweetened chocolate into a cup of hot steamed milk at 3:00 am in the morning when one can’t sleep because the whole world is going to hell in a hand-basket and one cannot afford to move to Tahiti. http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/35383-will-the-us-own-up-to-its-role-in-europe-s-refugee-crisis
But it has been really hard to give up croissants. Pie. Birthday cake. Pancakes! But I can still eat all the whipped cream I want as long as there’s no sugar in it.
And when I stepped on the scale at the YMCA yesterday, I weighed 102 pounds. But does all this weight loss make me happy? No, hardly. It only makes me want to sneak into Libya or Yemen or Gaza and report on the type of news that even FaceBook isn’t telling us because there are no eye-witnesses to the genocides going on in those places who have easy access to computers. Or sugar. Or gluten either for that matter.
But going without sugar and gluten also makes me crazy — but in a good way. It magnifies my discontent. I am suddenly very unhappy that my apartment is filled with junk. I am now even more unhappy that my very own government is running guns to ISIS and al Qaeda abroad, and is being kidnapped by corporatists and banksters here at home.
Maybe discontent is a good thing. It keeps me from resting on my laurels. What laurels?
And as for losing control of my life, did I ever really have control of it in the first place? Even during those staid and normal years when I was getting my Masters degree at U.C. Berkeley? Or those wild and exotic years when I was hanging out with country-and-western musicians? Or all those years as a mother when I was basically surviving on chocolate chip cookie dough (as full of sugar and gluten as you can get)?
Do any of us ever really have our lives under control?
