The Sugar Conspiracy

You eat a lot of sugar. That is, if you live in the United States and eat "normal" food the way any "regular" person does, you eat a lot of sugar. A lot. Per capita, more than anyone else in the world. By a lot. It's kind of staggering how much, actually.

And you don't even know it.

Sure, sure, people say it (like I just did), so you have some vague intellectual knowledge that you eat a lot of sugar, but you don't know it. Not in any kind of experiential way. It's not like you're pouring sugar on your Sugar Frosted Flakes the way my friend used to do when I was a kid. Because that's just what you need on your sugar cereal, right? I'm sure you feel perfectly comfortable with your sugar intake because you're not actively participating in how much you consume.

And, you know, so what, right? So food has sugar in it; what's the big deal? It's not like it's hurting you, right? You can't even tell that it's there.

Which, actually, is the problem. You can't tell that it's there. Also, you can't tell any of the flavors of the food are there, either.

Once upon a time, I was just like "you," you being the "average" person in the US. I ate all of the packaged food and drank all of the sugarbomb drinks. And boy did I! All I drank was soda. And I didn't think there was a problem. Everything just tasted "normal."

Without getting into it, there came a time when we cut sugar out of our diet. [I'm sure I've got old posts about that, if you want to go look for them. Or maybe I don't. I don't remember.] It wasn't until after the sugar was gone that I realized how much flavor food has. No, seriously, actual flavor textures and complexities. And some things were sweet that I had no idea about. Like carrots! But when you eat sugar all the time (and you do), by comparison, a carrot is not sweet. In fact, it's just kind of crunchy and flavorless.

Bell pepper was my big surprise. It's not a food that I had ever really liked, because, compared to sugar, it's an even more crunchy, flavorless, even kind of bitter food than carrots. But that's totally wrong! And bell pepper has different flavors depending upon what color it is, which amazed me. AMAZED! Red is my favorite, followed by yellow. Orange is okay, and I tend to stay away from green. It's not that it's bad, but it's nowhere near as good as the other three.

It's not until after you quit eating all of the processed crap full of sugar that you can taste all the flavors in real food and realize that the processed stuff is basically flavorless other than a vague flavor of sweetness. Sometimes with salt. It's more than slightly disturbing. I can't drink soda anymore. It's so sweet as to be disgusting. And kettle corn (because they always have that at the fair or any other kind of crowded live event thing)? The smell of it (just the smell of it alone!) is so sweet that it makes me sick to my stomach. But that's only because I don't consume sugar all the time, because I used to think it smelled good.

It goes without saying, not even talking about the health implications, that I think "you" should probably cut sugar out of your regular diet. Not only will food taste better, but you'll actually be able to appreciate the things you eat that have a need to contain sugar (like homemade cookies). [Yes, chemically speaking, some things need to contain sugar.]

Of course, I'm not talking about sugar at all but about the trashy media you put in your brain that works the same way as sugar. (Not that I don't mean what I said about the sugar, too, but I think that's a better way to illustrate the problem than trying to talk about what you entertain your brain with.)

Not that the Left is completely blameless, but the adding of "sugar" to what you watch is something the Right has kind of turned into an art form. Starting with Fox news way back in the early 90s, they have constantly and consistently been covering the flavor (truth and facts) of what they present with sugar (falsehoods and propaganda). It skews your view of reality when you can no longer tell what is fact from what is not.

When I quit eating sugar, I almost immediately lost a lot of weight. "Effortlessly," as it were. I didn't have to go out an exercise or try or anything. Other than whatever "trying" went into not eating sugar, which wasn't as difficult as it sounds. BUT!
People asked me frequently how I lost all the weight, and I would say, "I quit eating sugar," and, without fail, they would respond, "Oh, I could never do that."

Fuck that shit! I grew up drinking nothing but soda, nothing!, and I quit. And it wasn't really all that hard. Ahead of time, I thought it was going to be hard, but, upon doing it, it was really pretty easy.

TV and media is kind of the same way, mostly in that you have to find something to fill all of that time with that you currently spend immersed in your sugarcoated media world designed exactly to keep you consuming it. And to keep you from thinking about how much of it you're consuming or, really, thinking at all.  Like sugar, see.
"Don't bother thinking for yourself; we'll tell you all the thoughts you need to have."
It's more than a little disturbing.

It's amazing, though, how much easier it is to see the lies when you're not ingesting them all the time. Of course, church doesn't help with any of this, because church sort of pre-programs people to believe fantasies, fables, and mythology as fact and truth. But that's a story for another time...

Changing Life (Change: part 3)

Weight:
Some number of years ago (no, I don't remember when, but I'm sure my wife could tell you), my wife and I dropped sugar from our diets. This was a significant change, especially for me. I grew up drinking soda and, when I say that, I mean I grew up drinking only soda. From a very young age, actually. I moved from apple juice to Coca~Cola, and soda was pretty much the only thing I drank for the next 30-odd years. Cutting sugar meant cutting the soda, which was one of the hugest changes I've made in my life. Ever.

The immediate result of that change was that I lost weight. A lot of weight. About 100 pounds in less than a year. At the time, I dropped to under 200 pounds for the first time since I was in high school. I kept all of it off for a while but, over time... well, you have to really stay focused, I suppose. At any rate, at my physical last year (during January or February), it finally hit me that I had let myself creep back up to about 245.

Well, that was enough of that.

So I started exercising again, something I'd let slide for a couple of years. [Seriously, why does exercising have to take up so much time?] And I started monitoring my portion sizes. When you don't eat sugar, it can make you feel justified with eating more. Well, me, anyway.

The short of all of that is that I am, now, under 200 pounds again, for only the second time since high school.

Coffee:
I think I have probably come off as a coffee drinker on here for years. I mean, with posts like this, I totally sound like a coffee drinker, right? But I was only barely a coffee drinker as I would only drink coffee if it was in chocolate. It took my wife a while to work me up even to that, because I grew up sans coffee. See above with the soda thing.

Basically, we could go to the cafe together because I could get a mocha, but my wife insisted that that wasn't the same thing. I... really didn't understand.

What we couldn't do, though, was sit around having coffee together when we went out for breakfast. My wife would have coffee, but I would just have water. (And, then, go to the cafe after for a mocha. heh) Again, I didn't get the big deal, but she assured me it wasn't the same as us sitting and having coffee together.

Well, she was right.

Long story short, I finally agreed to to try having coffee (just plain, old coffee) with my wife when we were out for breakfast one Sunday morning. No, I don't drink it black, but, I did buy her an espresso machine, something she has always wanted but didn't feel like it was worth it if she was going to be the only one using it. Now, we have coffee together every morning.

Beer:
As with coffee, I also grew up not drinking alcohol. Of any kind. My wife spent some number of years converting me to drinking wine (it was a slow process), but I still stayed away from beer. No, not on any kind of principle or anything; mostly, I just didn't like the way it smells. And not that my wife wants or likes to go hang out in bars but, every once in a while, she likes the option of going to share a beer in a bar. Except you can't do that when one of the people won't help share it. But, you know, I've been open to trying and tasting things over the years but, really, nothing ever really did it for me. Well, there was this one time years ago we got some blackberry beer at a local brewery, and I liked that, but they never had it again, and you can't buy it at the store or anything.

All of that changed this year. We were at an open mic night (probably the one where we first saw Parcivillian), and my wife got a beer... with the understanding that I was going to taste it. She got something called a Bitch Creek (because she liked the name). Well, we both loved it. Yeah, it was the first beer I ever really just liked. Or liked at all, but I liked it from the first taste. What we've discovered is that I like dark beers, especially stouts, which Bitch Creek was. That was not ever a thing we'd ever tried before. As it turns out, my wife tends toward darker beers, too, so that has really worked out, although she does have a broader palette than I do when it comes to beers and ales.

At any rate, we can now share a beer over dinner or grab a beer to share when we're out or whatever, so that has been a whole new thing for us, too, sort of like with the coffee.

Also, I have a new appreciation of the fact that some of the best breweries in the country are right here where I live.

The Struggle for Confidence (an IWSG post)

This post is part of Alex Cavanaugh's Insecure Writer's Support Group blogfest thing. Click the link for more information.

High school is a time for two kinds of people: those with superiority complexes (the jocks and cheerleaders) and those with inferiority complexes (pretty much everyone else). There's not a lot of middle ground there. Go watch pretty much any of the 80s high school movies by John Hughes to get a good look at what it's like. At least, what it was like in  the 80s. Or Better Off Dead (which is not by Hughes but still gives a good look at the chasm between the superior and the inferior).

However, the general consensus in psychology is that the superiority complex is just an act. Basically, at the root of both inferiority and superiority complexes, we find vast insecurities. Questions of worth. Belief in inadequacies. It's a hard thing to deal with. And, really, as much as we'd like to think we do, writers do not corner the market on any of those things.

Dealing with one's insecurities is a tremendous task, and it's a task that we are more and more sabotaging in this current day and age. That, also, is not just something that writers do, but I think it can be clearly seen amongst the blogging community of writers.

But let's back up a moment. What is the answer to feelings of insecurity? What do you do to make those pesky things go away?

Confidence.

Yeah, that's easier said than done, right?

I mean, what is confidence? I'm gonna keep it simple, so we'll just say that (self)confidence is a belief in one's own abilities.

Insecurity undermines confidence, and the thing that makes insecurity so common these days is the lack of reliable feedback from, well, everywhere. We live in a positive feedback society, and it makes it impossible to know if you're really doing well or not. [All of this ties into what I said here and all of the related stuff I've been saying since then. And before then.] If everyone is busy saying "you're doing great!", how do you know if you really are?

There are two responses:
1. the traditional: I must really suck, and no one wants to hurt my feelings.
2. the new-fangled: I'm awesome! (if you read yesterday's post, you'll have heard that this response is on the rise in the good ole USofA, right now (as in, it's becoming an issue in the American workforce)).
Both of these come out of an inability to judge our own performance because of a lack of reliable information due to faulty feedback.

You know, I get it. It feels so much better to surround yourself with people that say "oh, you're so great! you're so awesome! I love it and I love you!" It makes you feel better, and it makes them feel better, too, because they don't have to deal with any fallout from saying something negative. But, really, it's just like a diet of constant sugar. Sure, it tastes good, but, ultimately, it's gonna kill you. And, on the way to killing you, it will make everything else taste just godawful bad (see this post for more on how sugar ruins taste (or, actually, how much taste you will discover without sugar)). You will never develop confidence, actual confidence, surrounded by people who only say how great you are.

I mean, face it, how many people do you know that are actually made of AWESOME? Now, how many people do you know that think they are? Or, at least, espouse to that belief.

The thing is, confidence comes from within. It comes from knowing, I mean actually knowing, that you're good at something. Knowing it objectively, not feeling like you're good at it. All that feeling like you're good at something doesn't mean a thing if you actually suck. The problem is coming to an objective knowledge, and you can never come to an objective knowledge of something if you surround yourself with people who only ever tell you good things about it.

So I'm hearing some of you out there right about now protesting that there are no objective measures in something so subjective as writing, but that's where you'd be wrong, because there are objective measures (which I discussed, in part, here), and that's why we get books that a vast majority of people can agree are good and some that people will agree are bad. Sure, it's hard to pinpoint the specific things within a work of art that make it objectively better than some other work of art (do any kind of research on the popularity of Star Wars to see this), but that doesn't mean that those objective things don't exist. When a vast majority of people can agree that something is better than everything else, you can bet there is something objective behind it even if you can't measure what that objective thing is.

We all want to feel confident. We all want to have some ability to judge ourselves. Unfortunately, this starts with having people around us that are willing to tell us where and how we are screwing up. After that, it comes from repeated reliable feedback. Sometimes, as with an athlete, this comes from actual objective, indisputable data: "you ran this race in x seconds, the stop watch says so." Sometimes, this comes from people that are skilled in a particular area and can just tell you where you're falling short: "you're not bending your knees enough." Whatever the source, we need it. We need that thing that is willing to be honest with us about how we are doing if we want to get better.

I actually think that some of us don't want to get better. It's too hard. We'd rather just have people around us telling us how great we're doing and keep right on being sub-par for, well, forever as long as we can keep people around us to tell us we're great and awesome. I guess what you have to decide is whether you do want to get better, and, if you do, find those people that will help you to get there.

And just to give you some personal insight (that I don't think I've previously shared (although I could be wrong)):

For me, all of this started back in college. Well, really, in high school. Or before that. Anyway... I've known, on some level, that I was a good writer since elementary school. It was in high school that I figured that writing would always be a part of my life. It was in college that I decided, somewhat pretentiously, that real writers are poets. I spent my personal writing time (meaning non-assignment related) working on said poetry. I was in this writing group (not just any writing group, but a school group that you couldn't join without first... well, let's just say it was prestigious to be accepted into the group), and I was really pumping out the poetry for it, because, as I said, real writers are poets. The writing group was presided over by the English faculty, so it wasn't just a bunch of students patting each other on the back. We had people with experience in there. Anyway, one day I had this piece that I was particularly proud of that I'd read to an adequate response, meaning what usually happens with poetry, the ones that didn't "get" it said it was good, because they didn't want to be seen as not "getting" it, and the ones that did get it said it was pretty good. Well, except for one professor (the one that all the students feared and dreaded having, but who was the best English prof around). He didn't say anything specific during the meeting, but he did ask me a lot of pressing questions about the piece, questions about why I'd done particular things in my writing, etc, and it wasn't very comfortable, because, at 20, I didn't always have good answers for those things. After the meeting, he pulled me aside and said something to me that caused me to re-evaluate everything about my writing. He said, "This is great prose, but it's horrible poetry." I was too shocked to even be mad or upset about it. I'd never had anyone say anything like that to me before. He went on to tell me that that was often his response to my poetry, that it would be so great if it wasn't poetry. He suggested that I go back and re-write it as prose.

See, the thing is, he was right. I did go back to my room and read that piece again. And again. And again. Later, I wrote it out in paragraph form and read it again. I tweaked bits and parts and filled it out to make the language work, and it was great. When I took it back to the next meeting as a paragraph of writing and read it that way, no one had issues with understanding it, and everyone loved it. It was because he was honest with me, though. What's more, he allowed me to look at my own work from a more objective viewpoint because he had been honest with me about it. As much as I'd like to be, I am not gifted in poetry. I still work with it sometimes and, occasionally, come up with some things that are decent, but it's not my strength. I only work with it as a writing exercise that makes all of my writing stronger.

The point, though, is that we all need someone who can speak to us like that. Someone that will say, without fear, "this is horrible." Someone that we trust to be saying that out of a desire to help rather than put us down or just to make us feel bad. Yeah, that person can be tough to find, but we all need at least one of those.

The path to confidence requires courage. The courage to be honest and accept honest feedback. I hope you all find the strength to walk that path.

Popcorn Reading

I love popcorn. Especially, I love movie theater popcorn. It's horrible. I can't go to a movie without wanting it. I'm sure that's what the theater wants, too, and that smell is sooo... intoxicating. I used to not be able to go to the movies without buying popcorn. Of course, movies were cheaper then. The popcorn was cheaper, too.

It wasn't really the money that made me quit buying popcorn all the time, though; it was my kids. Okay, it was the money, too, but, really, it was my kids. I mean, it's one thing for me to make the decision to put all that crap into my own body, but, back when we used to actually do (almost) a weekly movie during the summers, I didn't think I needed to put all that crap into my kids bodies, too. Even if they did enjoy it and want it.

Still enjoy it and want it.

The thing with popcorn is that it's so easy to just keep eating and eating it. Handfuls at a time. Don't give me a large bag of popcorn to hold at the theater and expect to get some. I will eat it all. You'll reach over to get some, and it will be gone. All of it. Well, there'll probably be a few loose kernels in the bottom of the bag. I won't have meant to have eaten it all, it will have just happened. The same goes for the lesser microwave popcorn at home. I will eat it. I might not even feel bad afterward.

Sugar is the same way. Things with sugar in them, anyway. It's so easy to sit down with a bag of, say, peanut butter cups and eat the whole thing without realizing it. And it makes you want more and more of it.

Eating junk makes you want to eat more junk. That's the way it's designed. Even when we know it's bad for us, we want to eat it anyway. I mean, it's been... well, it's been years since I've had a soda, but, sometimes, I still want one. And I think one can't be that bad, right? It's been years since I had one, so what could it hurt? But that will just make me want more and more. Once I re-acclimate myself to it, that is. Because, actually, having been off of sugar for so long means that anything that has any sugar in it at all is usually way too sweet for me.

The thing is, though, if you give people the option between something that's good for them and something that's bad for them, they'll usually pick the thing that's bad for them. Well, assuming it tastes good. I was certainly that way when I was a kid, which is why I grew up on soda. My kids are no different. They want to eat crap all the time. Even though we don't keep sweets and treats in the house and have a habit of not eating that way, they ask for things every single day. Every single day. EVERY SINGLE DAY! And it drives us crazy every night! NO! WE ARE NOT GOING OUT FOR ICE CREAM! NO! WE ARE NOT GOING TO SIFT FOR CUPCAKES! Why do you keep asking that when you get the same answer every day?! Oh! My! Gosh!

People, especially kids, don't have the ability to look at their food choices objectively and weigh the advantages and the disadvantages and choose accordingly. Mostly, because they can't see what the disadvantages are. Or choose not to see them. Most people respond to things the same way my younger boy responds to food:
"Yum, this is full of sugar and carbs; this is awesome!" [Even though it's objectively bad for him.]
"Yuck! That's green and leafy and disgusting!" [Even though it's good for him.]
However, if you work with the things that are good for you, eventually, you will like them. And I know, because I grew up hating broccoli and yams, hating them with a passion (at one point, I think I vowed to my mother that I would never EVER eat broccoli), but those are two of my favorite foods now. And my younger son also likes yams, now, because we kept making him eat them.

The real issue is that you have to train yourself to like the things that are good for you. And it's not easy. I grew up with a cook for a mother. A southern cook. Let me just tell you right now that the southern diet is not the most healthy in the world. Even the things in it that are good for you are cooked in such a way as to not be good for you. They'll boil the nutrients right out of anything. And, if it can't be boiled, they'll batter it and fry it. Or, you know, throw sugar all over it. Want to eat strawberries in the south? Cut them up and toss sugar on  them. Why? It's already fruit; it doesn't need sugar. But that's how I ate strawberries when I was a kid. And why eat broccoli when there was fried okra as an option (and the okra smelled so much better!)?

At some point, though, you have to look at what you're putting in your body and say, "Is this good for me?" If the answer is "no," you have to train yourself into a different behavior set. And, no, I can't tell you how to do that. You have to figure that out for yourself.

Of course, I'm not really talking about food here. I mean, I am talking about food, but I'm also talking about books. Of course, I'm not the first to compare books to food. I'm probably not even the first to compare junk food to junk books. At any rate, just like most people (in the US, at least) spend way too much time eating junk food, most people that read (because most people actually do not read) spend way too much time reading junk books. Popcorn books.

A lot of people would say, "but at least they're reading something," and I almost agree with that. Except that saying that would be like saying of an adult that was still eating baby food, "well, at least, s/he's eating something." Yeah, I know it's not the same, but it kind of is.

See, I know some people that like to brag about how many books they read. And, yes, they read a lot of books. A couple of them read, like, 250 books a year. But they're all the same kind of book (and I'm not gonna say what kind that is), and they amount to popcorn. At least, that's how I visual it. All pretty much the same with very little substance. Not challenging. Not anything.

So when someone says, "at least, they're reading;" I think, "I'm not so sure about that."

I don't have a problem with reading for pleasure. Reading is great, and reading should be enjoyable. I also think reading should prompt us to think and, hopefully, to grow. The occasional treat is fine, but you really shouldn't try to live off of them (treats), just like you shouldn't use McDonald's as your dietary staple. Okay, McDonald's is trying to reform a little, so we'll go with Burger King. [Actually, it's been so long since I ate at either of those places, I don't know how they are.]

Other than observing people that just read the equivalent of literary junk food all the time, it's my own kids that got me thinking about this. Just like not letting them have popcorn all the time, I can't let them read easy, non-challenging books all the time.

When I was a kid, I didn't have anyone to help me navigate books. My family does not read. I stumbled my way through on Hardy Boys and stuff I could pick up at school until I started having things assigned  to me, and, even then, in my head there was a differentiation between what I read on my own and what I was assigned at school. It didn't matter that I liked the books I was being assigned at school; they were still a different category, so I spent my time otherwise reading literary junk. It wasn't until my junior year of high school that I figured out that I could explore "real" literature on my own. Of course, by that time, I'd wasted seven years of reading on (mostly) popcorn.

I don't want my kids to do that. Not that I force them to read anything, but I do make suggestions.

There's nothing wrong with reading the occasional piece of fluff. It's nice to have a mental break from thinking from time to time. It's something else entirely to devote yourself to only mental fluff. It makes it difficult to recognize something that is actually, really, good, because it's too challenging to get into. Everyone should challenge themselves to grow as readers. To start reading, to read more broadly, to read more deeply. Learn to like your broccoli and yams. I did.

No Sugar Added (part 1)

There's a battle being waged in the United States, at the moment. Actually, there are several; however, it's the fat war that is probably the most significant to people on a personal level. It should be, at any rate. Me? I'm all into the fight for the environment, because that's all about what we can do for our kids and our grand kids, etc, but, people being mostly self-focused, the war against food should be more prominent. I say the war against food, but, perhaps, what I should say is the war for food, because a lot of what we (that being  the collective we, not me) eat is not actually food at all. It's just chemicals and additives, and it's destroying lives.

I'm going to get off the soap box, now, because this really isn't a post about that. Besides, you can go pick up any random package of food in your house and look down the list of ingredients and see how many of them that you actually recognize. And how many things don't start with "high fructose corn syrup."

A few years ago, my wife and I made a huge lifestyle change. Let me just make it clear that we didn't go on a "diet." Diets don't work (don't argue with me about that, statistics back up what I'm saying as an actual fact, not an opinion). Diets don't work, because people see "going on a diet" as a temporary change to reach a desired goal. Once said goal is achieved, they revert back to what they were doing before the diet, and, of course, end up back where they started. Or worse. So... my wife and I didn't go on a diet; we made a lifestyle change.

It was actually a fairly simple thing to do, although people always stare at me in disbelief when I say  this and, inevitably, respond with "I could never do that." To a certain extent, I can understand that. However, having done it, I can't. I reacted the same way when my wife said she wanted to do this, although it wasn't the thing in and of itself that was the issue for me; it was the soda. See, my wife said to me that she wanted us to cut sugar out of our diets. Not just sugar, really, but simple carbs. That means sugar, HFCS (high fructose corn syrup), and white flour. There are some other things, but those are the big ones.

I grew up on soda. I mean that. Didn't drink anything else. Not even water. Well, there was milk at school. Chocolate milk (which has just as much sugar). Because that was the only option (the milk, not the chocolate), but, otherwise, I drank soda. Coca~Cola, preferably, but, as long as it was carbonated, I'd drink it. Almost. So the idea of giving up soda, which had pretty much been my sole beverage for 30 years and more, was pretty daunting to me. I wasn't sure if I could do it.

It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I just quit buying it.

Now, there are a lot of directions I could take this, at this point. For instance, I could tell you about the weight loss. I could tell you about the increased health. Increased health not just from the weight loss but from eating better food. After all, when you cut everything with HFCS in from your shopping list, you have to replace it with something (for us that meant more raw foods). I could you tell you about mood improvement. However, I'm going to tell you about just one thing: taste.

I don't think you can understand how much flavor fruits and vegetables have just on their own. I never knew. We process the flavor out of everything. Or drown it in sugar. Everything! It's horrible. Carrots are sweet. Did you know that? So are bell peppers. And they taste different depending upon what color they are. I like the red and orange ones the best. I never knew they had flavor variations before we dropped the sugar from our diet. It was all AMAZING! Trying new foods suddenly became something I wanted to do rather than dreading it.

We live in a culture that wants to homogenize everything. The big melting pot. Food. People. Entertainment. Fit in. Go with the flow. Drench yourself in corn syrup and blend in. I'm not for that. I'm for cutting the sugar out of our lives. The real and the metaphorical. Don't blend in. Don't be like everyone else. Have your own taste. Your own flavor.

I'd like to say that writers have a leg up on that over other people, but I look at what's available on  the reading shelves (especially after some huge hit of a book), and I know that's not true. We are just as prone to jumping on band wagons as everyone else. What I'm saying is that it's time to find our own wagons.

And to put just one other slant on this, as writers, we often get stuck in patterns. We have our own "sugar" that we coat everything with. I could name authors who started out good (and I mean good) but had their own brand of sugar that they poured all over all of their writing so that it all ended up tasting the same. The problem with that is that you only need to read that author once and you've really read everything they've ever done.

Don't sugar coat your lives. Or your food. Be different. Change things up. Develop your own flavor and your own taste!

Next: How this all affects... coffee!