Enter: Peanut Brittle

How did I do on my 10 day No Sugar Challenge? Truth? Well, about five days into it, I found the peanut brittle. I had bought it over the holidays as a treat. But this Christmas, unlike most others, I was very disciplined about watching what I was eating. The good news about that? I didn't gain any weight over Christmas. The bad thing was I kept the unopened box of peanut brittle and one day I just happened to find it in the cupboard. Perhaps I should have tossed it then. Or never bought it in the first place. But it served a good lesson. I didn't toss it, I opened it. I ate four or five (ten?) pieces before I even came up for air and then I came to my senses. I stopped. About an hour later, I felt bad. Really bad. I don't think I got any rush from eating it, but I certainly crashed an hour later. Beside that one incident and (oh by the way) wine a couple of times like I already confessed, I did well. No sugar. It wasn't easy. But overall, I'd give myself a B- for the ten day challenge. Maybe I'm too easy on my grading system? Perhaps. But I'm not stopping at 10 days. I am going another 10. And this time my goal isn't to be perfect, but as close as I can be. After a lifetime of failed dieting, I'm going to try a new approach. At 63, there may be a lot of things about aging that are a pain, literally. But here's one that is very refreshing and almost comforting. It isn't about wearing a size 6 anymore. Its about health! So, my new approach is not that I'll lose weight to get healthy, but rather that I'll get healthy, and then, perhaps my body will return me to a healthier weight. And a new path, charted by doctors like Dr. Robert Lustig of UCSF Medical Center, who have fingered sugar as the poison and, as he points out, a whole host of players at the table of blame:

1.The Health Insurance Industry, who will hound you to lose weight, but not pay for the process, because they point the finger at the individual.
2.The Obesity Profiteers (like Weight Watchers), who make $117B a year off of fat people. They do want some of us to be successful to hold our pictures up to the rest of us pathetic souls. But they really don't want to solve the problem for good.
3. The Commercial Food Industry, who took all the fat out of our food and pumped it full of salt and sugar to make up for it. Now HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) is in almost everything because it's a cheap way to get processed food to taste good. And sodium is pumped up in soda (and then more sugar added to mask the salt) to make you thirsty so you have to supersize your drink.
4. The Government, who told the food industry to take the fat out to begin with and continue to blame the individual...oh, and subsidize the corn growers so they can continue to pump more sugar into the food supply.
5. The Medical Community, who keeps telling us to eat broccoli, beans and wild salmon, and exercise until we drop (but in the dark, please, or we might get skin cancer). Red wine is good for you....oh, no, bad....oh, no good, really. But all things in moderation. Reminds me of the French who believe all things in moderation, especially moderation!
6. And us, the individuals, who either give up all together and become fat activists "Big is Beautiful" or just keep beating our heads against the wall, feeling worse about ourselves because we are such failures. Oh, and there's one other outcome for the individual, the saddest of all: those that go to Biggest Loser type boot camps where screaming meanies will publicly humiliate them while networks rack up the big bucks.

This is insanity. The problem according to Dr. Lustig is not the obesity. Twenty percent of obese people are perfectly healthy. On the other hand, an estimated 40% of normal weighted people are sick. The illness is called Metabolic Syndrome. Metabolic Syndrome is caused by our diet (which also happens to make many of us fat). And for that, there is a path to health. According to Dr. Lustig, the path is cutting the sugar and exercising, not because exercising will help us burn calories but because it will help balance our hormones. I already exercise. I will keep it up. And I will continue to cut the sugar as I continue to research this huge national (and personal) problem and try a new approach to turning it around.