I cherry-pick what I do from overheard wisdoms and Instagram
previews of videos I never watch. Walking is my secondary weapon of choice and I
get quite a bit of that in every day. It works better, I find, if I can put my
mind to it but my mind is invariably elsewhere when I’m walking, up some frosty
mountain or nestled in some dim back room.
But my main approach to losing a kilo or three is to lay off
the sugary things. I share this dubious advantage with smokers, I guess. If you’re
a smoker and you want to do better, health-wise, you have a clear but difficult
route. You give up smoking. For me, my baseline copious sugar habit gives me
the same thorny pathway to improvement. Lay off the buns.
So I’m doing what I did last year, which seemed to be
working. I’m getting some extra mindful steps in, underusing my fixed
bike/clothes horse, and cutting out everything sugary that I can find. The upshot
is not that I become suddenly svelte or godlike but the weighing scales do move
in a satisfactory, but slow, backward direction.
But, man, I miss my sugar.
As a person who never smoked, gets a bit pissed on one
bottle of Coors Lite, doesn’t gamble, doesn’t… do anything really, the sweets
and chocolate were my vice and my reward and my crutch. If the day was going
badly, a Double Decker could smooth out the bumps and if things were going
excellently a Fry’s Chocolate Crème might be a just reward. I think most people
like sugar but I don’t think most people like it in the same way that I do. My
habit goes back to early childhood when I first gained the autonomy to go to
the shops by myself. My much-missed brother Michael would send me off for a
large bottle of Coke after his day’s work and the accompanying tip would allow
me to have some little confectionary boost of my own. Something that was rapidly
consumed before I made it back home.
In college, I subsisted on gang packs of biscuit and fizzy drinks
and, crucially, annoyingly (now), never gained a pound. I had the constitution
of a greyhound and no amount of calorie intake seemed to change that.
But times passed, metabolisms slowed, and the sugar highs
started to come with a subtle but steady price. In my mind, aged sixty-one, I
am the same lean, mean, word machine that I always was. But the mirror and the
scales conspire to tell a different tale.
So here I stand. Sweetless, chocolate-less, fizzy drink
less. Trying to seek out and omit every pocket of clandestine sugar that exists
in my life. It gets easier… but not all that much.
The petrol station display speaks to me. “You have miles to
go before you sleep,” it says, “and a double Mars bar would ease the journey
quite a bit, wouldn’t it?” Similarly the sweet aisle of Tesco (as opposed to
the lake isle of Innisfree) lays out in front of my trolley as if to say, “would
we really all be here if it wasn’t right that you bought at least a few of us and
ate us on the way home?”
But I persist. I’ll keep at it, at least until Christmas ’25,
when it will probably start to go literally pear shaped again. The benefits of
all this denial are slight but not slight enough if you know what I mean. Still, every pound shed feels like a little win. I imagine that I feel better as I go and
imagining you feel better is every bit as good as actually feeling better.
But these are the good times and it’s easier to do this kind of thing in the
good times. I can give up on the reward sugar, I can give up on the treat sugar.
But the crutch sugar, when it is needed, will surely be the
hardest of all.
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