That’s right, after 10 months of refusing everything delicious, my health is not significantly different. But my willpower is. I did lose 20 pounds, which is great, but it might have more to do with returning to the gym than it did not eating desserts. My blood sugar level, measure by an A1C test, is exactly the same.
But health wasn’t the point of this exercise anyway. Proving my family wrong was.
It all began after Thanksgiving 2015. I had devoured pecan pie, apple pie, chocolate covered peanuts and vanilla ice cream. Then I had birthday cake. Ford’s and Owen’s birthdays are three days apart and usually fall on either side of Thanksgiving. I ate all of this after a hefty amount of the traditional Thanksgiving fare, and that night — and for many days afterward, because I ate leftovers — my stomach felt like lead.
As we drove back to Maine, I said out loud, “I’m not eating desserts again until next Thanksgiving.”
It’s true that I only half believed myself, but when snickering rippled from the backseat of the car to the driver’s seat, where my husband was sitting, I knew there was no other choice but to prove them all wrong.
I got the same reaction and subsequent resolve in 2009 when I told my husband that I was going to quit drinking alcohol for a while.
What he said was, “Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.”
What I did was not drink for a full year, and then not drink some more every day since, for going on eight years. It’s funny how you learn to not like the taste of something after a while.
The hardest part about promising not to eat desserts for a year, however, is deciding what qualifies as dessert. Is dessert something you eat after dinner? Is it anything that has refined sugar? Chocolate? Cream? Are flavored coffees “dessert”? Is fruit? What about whipped cream? And mints? Or gum?
Eventually I defined “dessert” by tradition: chocolate, cookies, cakes, pies, ice cream and even frozen yogurt would be forbidden. Fruit (without whipped cream) was allowed.
The early months, which encompassed Christmas, were difficult as I tried to quell my sweet tooth without dessert. I ate a whole lot of fruit, and if I closed my eyes, I could almost — just barely — believe that Chobani pineapple yogurt was ice cream.
It’s not even close, so far as I can remember.
Which is why my year hiatus from desserts will not go the way drinking did and last for many years. This year I learned that I love desserts.
There are, however, a few other things I’ve learned from this experiment that I will carry with me when the blessed days of eating cookies and cake return.
I love frosted sugar cookies.
By far, the most challenged I felt was when I iced homemade sugar cookies for the kids at Christmas. I love frosted sugar cookies an unhealthy amount. It took everything in me — and the ever-watchful, doubtful eyes of my family — to keep myself from licking the vanilla icing from my hands. Then I watched as everyone around me bit into the hot, gooey goodness and smacked their lips.
I love Easter candy.
Each year, I look forward to the arrival of Cadbury Mini Eggs like some people await the next Harry Potter book. When I first see them on the shelf, I squeal, and if I knew in advance when they’d be unpacked, I might camp out waiting. A low point came this Easter when I actually sniffed the empty Cadbury Mini Eggs bag my son left in the car.
Fruit is not dessert.
Fruit is amazing. I ate a whole watermelon by myself when I was pregnant with my middle son. But fruit is not dessert. Chocolate is dessert. Ice cream is dessert. Birthday cake is dessert. Fruit is just fruit, unless it’s smothered in whipped cream and sitting in a pie shell.
People eat a lot of dessert.
If you’re merely a grief-stricken observer when desserts are served, you realize just how much people eat them. It was the same way with abstaining from alcohol: when you’re the only sober person in the room, you notice things. The worst is sitting at an ice cream shop with the family and pretending that your soda is kind of like dessert. It’s not.
People don’t care if you don’t eat dessert, only if you don’t drink alcohol.
Society has been much more accepting of my no-desserts challenge than they are my no-alcohol one.
People’s response after they hear I’m not eating dessert: “Good for you! You must feel great!”
People’s response after they hear I quit drinking: “What? Why would you do that?”
I can’t wait for Thanksgiving 2016.
I already have a list of things I want to eat this Thanksgiving, and not one of them is mashed potatoes or turkey. First up, frosted sugar cookies. Next, Cadbury Mini Eggs.
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