Scary
The beginning of candy season

The spooky season has officially opened in my house. It began two weeks ago when a dish of candy corn crept onto a coffee table just before one of my husband's classes met in our house. I don't know how it got there. It just appeared.

The invasion became very real yesterday when a well-meaning college student entertained a burst of domesticity, making homemade candies and passing them out to professors and friends. My husband came home with a generous container of buckeyes.

Around here that's what we call chocolate-dipped peanut butter balls, those pretty little truffle-like candies that taste like the popular peanut butter/chocolate candy bar whose name we don't pronounce under our roof any more.

It was a gift. A beautiful, thoughtful gift.

And there they were.

In my house.

Another class came by in the afternoon, and we offered them up. That took care of most of the boxful. But when the students left, there were 5 buckeyes. Five of them.

I ate four.

And then I ate the last one, because, you know, I wanted to get rid of the container. It was cluttering up the kitchen counter.

Oh I screwed up.

They were so good. I've never had better buckeyes in my whole life. And they were pretty too. Beautiful and short-lived.

I really screwed up. I feel funny about it today. On the one hand, I know better than to beat myself up about it, though I have a strong urge to do that. On the other hand, I know that the season has barely opened, and I'm already having a sugar problem. I resisted the candy corn for a week, never eating a single piece. Now I'm whittling the bowl down kernel by kernel.

The buckeyes were a small step, really, from the corn. What's next is full-blown Halloween (an event in the U.S. wherein we push candy to children and model addictive, binge behaviors. Most will never recover. But on the bright side, there are costumes involved, and prizes. Grumpy, grumpy Juju.) Thanksgiving pies and desserts, Christmas candy and cookies, Valentines chocolates and jellybeans.

It's the whole, frightening, inexorable, suffocating avalanche of winter sweets, and we North American humans begin stocking, sharing, and celebrating with the first snap of cold air.

I have two modes where sweet things are concerned, On and Off. I can't moderate. Some people can and do. My husband is one of them. He can decide to eat or not eat sweet things based on how he feels, his mood. But for me, I must maintain a no sugar policy, or I have no control at all.

By slipping this early in the season, I'm setting myself up for more than a little holiday gain. I'm paving a path to serious relapse. I have to nip this in the bud.

Already I have symptoms of sugar rush-and-crash. Headache, stomach twinges, the jitters. HUNGER. Nothing triggers hunger in me as easily and viciously as pure sugar.

Oooooph. Those buckeyes were great. But that's over.

It's over.

Sugar = Pain. Sugar = Hunger. Sugar = Crazy woman losing all sense of proportion and propriety, gnashing at anything in her path that looks remotely edible.

I'm done. I'm steel. I'm going to give myself a week without any at all. One week, and then see how I feel.

How about you in this season of scary sweets? What's your strategy for dealing with the candy that seeps in under the door? Consider whether it's better for you to allow yourself small, controlled tastes of the stuff to keep cravings at bay, to eliminate sugar completely, or to have another strategy altogether.

Sugar one day per week?

Sugar once a month and only at the end of a meal at your favorite restaurant?

How about allowing specific treats, on specific days -- one piece of Halloween candy on Halloween, a certain pie on Thanksgiving Day, a specific cookie on Christmas Day, etc.

Make a plan and write it down. List all the temptations you know this season will bring, and know how you will sidestep them.

Be ready,

JuJu


Blood sugar crashing, the symptoms
Sugar = Hunger
Sugar = Migraine Pain, Maybe


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