Preparation for the Junk Food Battle

     I can enjoy eating a salad with little or even no dressing.  I enjoy not having any salt on my food.  I enjoy eliminating all animal products (red meat, poultry, fish, cheese, milk, eggs, etc) from my diet.  In the end, I guess what I am saying is I enjoy eating food as fuel--eating to live, not living to eat.  With one exception: sweets.  I can do well if there are no sweets around--which I will admit I am the biggest offender of bringing sweets home from the store; reference: the chocolate and cookies and cream stuffed marshmallows plus graham crackers from Walmart last night.  So, the simplest thing is to do is not buy any sweets.  Sometimes I ask my wife to make a treat, and boy does she make some amazing chocolate chip cookies!  And it is difficult not to down the whole batch.  My oldest daughter has become an excellent baker as well!  That is an occasional problem at home.  The main problem is the candy at work.  Yes, the giant, endless supply in the treat bowl at work.  Especially when I work a night shift, and I have a lot more time spent sitting at the office computer right next to the candy bowl.

     Like Frog and Toad, from the stories of the two amphibian friends written and illustrated by Arnold Lobel (by the way if you haven't read the Frog and Toad stories I highly recommend all of them, they are great for both kids and adults!), I keep saying, “Just one last cookie,” and then, “Just one very last cookie.”  And on and on it goes, until a little after I feel sick.  Moving the candy bowl to a spot farther away in the office has helped before.  Last time it didn’t.  That ten-foot separation was no match for me.  It was like when Frog and Toad had their box of cookies and they put it in a box, tied it with a string, and put it on a high shelf.

     Toad said something like, “We can get a ladder and take them down, cut the string, open the box, and eat the cookies.”  Frog finally just takes the cookies outside and gives them to the birds.

     “Now we have no more cookies to eat,” says Toad.  “Yes,” replies Frog, “But we have lots of will power.”  “You may keep it all, Frog,” says Toad, “I am going home now to bake a cake.”

     Since I am more like Toad, counting on will power for me, and I am sure many others, seems to be a losing battle.  So, the other night I went prepared for battle at work.  I packed plenty of healthy food for my 12-hour night shift.

     My battle plan was to have a full belly of food so I didn’t eat candy.  This certainly helped and worked to a certain degree, but when given the choice of candy or lentil soup, I opted for the candy first.  So, unfortunately, I still ate a good amount of the mini-Snickers, Midnight Milky Ways, 3 Musketeers, Twix, Reese's peanut butter cups and Reese's Pieces, Starbursts, Jolly Ranchers, and even plain Hershey's milk chocolate.  The next day I was listening to my audiobook “Eat to Live,” by Dr. Joel Fuhrman, and learned that we are designed to have a desire for sweets so that we will eat fruit, since we require the nutrients in fruit to be healthy.  If we fill up on sweets from fruit our desire to eat candy sweets will be fulfilled.  Americans consume, on average, 30 teaspoons (10 tablespoons or 5/8 cup) of added sugar per day!  Having too many sweets from sugar increases calcium loss from the urine and can contribute to osteoporosis.  Refined foods, such as sugar, are linked to several malignancies such as oral, stomach, colorectal, intestinal, breast, thyroid, and respiratory tract cancers.  They are also linked to diabetes, gallbladder disease, and heart disease.  Of course, extra sugar causes dental cavities.  And many other problems are related to excess sugar. 

     I was very glad to hear that satisfying the sweet tooth with fruit would blunt the craving for candy.  “The best prescription is knowledge,” said Dr. C. Everett Koop, and I am grateful for the new knowledge.  So the next night at work, I again brought a bunch of healthy food, and this time I also added a whole bag of frozen jack fruit to conquer the desire for sweets.

     I must say, it worked like a charm.  My desire for sweets was satisfied, and I did not have any candy, and I didn’t miss it either.  Plus, I got all of the beneficial vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, and fiber (15 grams) from the fruit, and it is only 250 Calories for the whole bag, which is probably less Calories than I ate of the candy.  Other than a couple tiny peanut chunks in the Snickers, there is almost no beneficial nutrients in the candy.  I am glad to have found the non-will power solution, a.k.a. the “Toad Solution,” to my sweets problem for the night shift at work.