26 Feb 2021

It’s not a secret in my family that certain members have a very sweet tooth, while others have a preference for more savoury style food.

I suspect that if I told my husband we were going to attempt the no sugar diet, he’d leave home. But not before he gave it a valiant attempt, blithely saying ‘I don’t eat any sugar, this will be no problem at all’, and then within the next 30 seconds realising that all the foods he really likes, are either full of natural or artificial sweeteners. He couldn’t survive. And more to the point, possibly I couldn’t survive the experience of him not surviving the experience.

I, on the other hand, enjoy sweetness when it comes from fruit, but really don’t bother about other stuff.

But if you were take fat away from me, we probably wouldn’t talk again. Just the sheer thought of having a piece of toast without butter on it, makes me shudder. My very very top secret favourite thing (this is just between you and me, ok?) at the moment is a savoury pumpkin and ricotta muffin (bought from the coffee shop over the road), toasted, and with butter slathered on top of it. That same muffin, without the butter, would possibly be quite nice but I doubt I would go back for seconds.

Savoury is my preference in food – this does not mean I don’t like chocolate, or a bit of cake on occasion, but if presented with a table full of yummy stuff I’d veer towards the savoury first.

Now I’m sure that you, like me, have heard or delivered lectures about stuff that is bad for you. So many many things are bad for us. They are slowly poisoning you, shriek those who are really very impassioned on the subject! Yeh, I know. But I kind of like them anyway.

I remember hearing a Billy Connolly routine years ago, about the benefits of eating whole meal and whole grain bread as opposed to white bread. He recalls being told it will add ten years to his life if he eats the healthier stuff. His response was, “Maybe – but it won’t be the fun ten years, will it? It won’t be ten more years of being in your twenties and being fit and active and partying with friends, will it? It will be ten more years of sitting around being old and feeble, with no friends because they all died ten years ago after living their life happily eating white bread”.

Yes I know we need to look after ourselves and keep as healthy as we can for as long as we can. But to me that means choosing your poison. Don’t have everything you know is bad for you. Pick one or two. Really good ones. Eat or drink them in moderation, and enjoy your life. Until told otherwise by a health professional, of course 🙂

If that happens, pick another poison.

By the way – with all the due diligence that I put into research for these things, I looked up stuff that is actually poisonous for your body. I knew that apple seeds contain cyanide, of course, but despite my husband eating apple cores ever since I’ve known him, he hasn’t died once – so you obviously have to eat an awful lot of them.

Apparently over ripened potatoes can kill you, raw kidney beans, black licorice, and the leaves of tomatoes and rhubarb can be deadly! Even rice apparently contains arsenic.

There are a lot of ways we could actually poison ourselves, so I’m comfortable with my pumpkin muffin with butter. If it’s killing me, hopefully by the time I’m ready to go I still have some friends around who haven’t been living off kale smoothies.