The Next Step

I keep learning things from my young'ns.  This is my granddaughter, E. She's J's big sister and she'll be three in October. She's looking at her bowl of cereal with a skeptical look because I've just told her that she doesn't need me to pour on some of the "sugar" from the little yellow packets that I always use on my cereal.  Those are Whole O's (basically plain cheerios from Whole Foods), a diced, ripe peach, and some skim milk.   (I know her parents don't add sugar, and certainly not artificial sweetener, to her food) She's into all things "grown up" now.  She wears "big girl" panties,  uses a spoon and a fork, loves sunglasses, uses the "grown up" toilet in preference to a potty chair, and eats her hot dogs whole, and not chopped up like "baby J" does.  She wanted to indulge in what she saw as another "grown up" habit--using artificial sweetener on her food.  I had to use my best persuasive skills to talk her into enjoying her cereal without Splenda.

I've known about my excessive love of sweets for many, many years.  My parents didn't buy the sugared cereals, but I knew where the sugar bowl was and always added three or four secretive spoons full to my plain cereal.  When I first began to try to lose weight (my HS years), I started using artificial sweeteners.  I've changed brands over the years, but I've always had them close at hand to give my foods the sweet-sweet taste I love. I use them on cereal,  in my coffee or tea, on grapefruit, and sprinkled on popcorn.  I tried Stevia, but didn't like the aftertaste. I buy Splenda packets in the biggest size (1000 packets/box) and always have an emergency ziplock-stash of them in my purse when we travel.  About eight weeks ago, in this post, I included a picture of a breakfast we had on a trip.  I was proud of the planning I'd done to eat a good healthy breakfast every day on our trip.  When I look at that picture today, I see a good breakfast with, probably, eight packets of added Splenda (on the cereal in a white heavy snowfall and, surely, sweetening up that Starbucks skim latte).  Even then, I noticed the obvious over-indulgence in Splenda and noted that some day I'd work on that bad habit.

That "some day" has arrived.  I could wait to announce a new goal for the new week of the Summer Diet Buddies challenge, but I'm not a "wait-until-Monday" person.  As of now, this minute, I will begin to give up my dependence on  Splenda.  I mostly use unprocessed foods, but I know that a few of my regulars  (like my beloved WW latte bars) use Splenda or Sucralose, I'll work on those later.  For now, I will reduce my added Splenda to two total packets per day.   I don't like coffee without sweetener, so this means that unless I'm willing to eat my cereal "au naturel" like E, I give up coffee.  I really like sweetener in my tea, too--aaak!   Maybe 1 packet for cereal and one for a hot beverage.  I can do this.  Watch me!

OT:  Head on over the Sharon's latest post for an interesting discussion on the challenges of weight loss for the "more mature" loser.  Lots of great comments.

Do you ever fall back on the "do as I say, not as I do" excuse in regard to food?