Sweet Surrender

The place where I’m currently contracting “transformed” itself recently from the staid, conservative, no-fun corporation that defines nearly all of American business into a staid, conservative, no-fun corporation with a zippy slogan. It’s the same place, but with a different address and a bumper-sticker slogan designed to distract the associates from the drudgery of their days. It’s as if the executives figured that they could deceive the employees by adding three exclamation points after the company logo.

In keeping with this new ‘theme’, the company has staged several All Hands meetings in the atrium of their new building, gathering all the ‘family’ together to make announcements that make neither sense nor difference to those standing beneath the stage. Yet they stand there as proper drones, getting jostled by the Event Staff, who wear ear pieces and scowls, in direct conflict to their slammer-happy CompanyWear.

The last such extravaganza happened today, Halloween, the great pagan New Year turned into a gluttony-laden festival of bad taste and faux food. The Event Staff spent all day yesterday decorating the atrium, blocking both exterior entrances in the process. Visitors and candidates sidled through the curtains and past executive dressed as cowboys, surgeons and ballerinas (all 3 were men), and into the fray of flashing cameras and jumbo screens projecting the costume contest on center stage.

And then, at 3pm, the floors buzzed anew, this time with little tykes dressed in costumes and angling for chocolate. Participating employees hung up ‘Trick or Treat Zone’ sheets on their cube walls and the kids walked around, digging into plastic pumpkins for candied treasures while their parents shoved them from row to row, repeating, 'say thank you, say thank you'.

Since my boss is awesome, even though I'm a temp, I get invited to all the shindigs, and I was appropriately enthusiastic about participating in the Gut-Rot For Kids Parade in the afternoon. I bought my candy, careful to keep it sealed until this afternoon, and when the first tyke arrived, I snapped the bags open, dumped them all on to the edge of my desk and went back to work.

I did all right until some 9-year-old plucked a snack-sized bar from my stash and unwrapped it on the spot. He proclaimed to his horrified parents that he was hungry and that this particular choco-bauble was his favorite. He slapped it down, not bothering to chew, took a 2^nd treat ‘for the road’ and wandered off, garbling a ‘thanks’ as he passed. When he did, the chocolate fumes smacked me square in the face.

I left at 4:30, deciding that I’d rather lose an hour’s wages than gain back any of the 54.50 pounds I’ve dumped from my frame. Don’t think I couldn’t do it; I’ve put away an entire bag of Nutter Butters in one sitting, not even bothering to get up for water until the peanut butter cemented my teeth together.

I just don’t get this. I’ve been on a regimented, disciplined weight loss program for almost 5 months. I’ve surmounted the Devil’s Plateau, and I’ve not had a single lapse since Day 2 of my diet, unless I count the time that pompous waiter snuck cheese into my steamed vegetable wrap. I shop in regular grocery stores, I’m in pharmacies several times a week, and there’s a vending machine right beside the coffee stand where I work. There is sugar aplenty in all these places, and I am indifferent to it. I’m aware that these sugared atrocities exist, but I thought my vulnerability to them existed only in the hypothetical. I thought I'd reached a point where I didn’t like sweets anymore. I used to like them, but no longer. They were part of my past: wanting them and eating them were things I used to do, like roller skate or wear bikinis.

Not so.

Sweets are my only food weakness. I don’t care for most other fat-making foodstuffs. I don’t like red meat, sauces of any kind, butter/margarine, anything fried, any form of potatoes, white rice, or pasta. Give me the grilled whitefish and the steamed vegetables, hold the glaze. Put the breadbasket wherever you like; I’m not interested. Water is fine; no need for wine or beer, and don’t even bother with the soda. But be sure to stop the dessert cart at meal’s end, and pass the sugar, please. If it weren’t for sugar, I’d be one of those wispy WaifGirls who dance about as if carried by smoke, choosing carrot sticks over dunking sticks and shunning all form of edible debauchery because, “I just don’t like it.”

Sugar caramelizes the world, and today, it caramelized my desk. I’d had over 100 days of temptation free, confidence-building, give-me-vegetables-or I’ll-pass-on-dinner moments, and then, when the Snack Size Butterfinger stared back at me, I blinked first. Ironic, that. Butterfinger. I don’t even like Butterfingers. Even in my heyday, when I’d eat anything labeled with sugar or its dozens of derivatives, I skipped the Butterfinger. It was one of those candy bars that I’d eat only if I were in my PMS Hungry Day, I was out of money and it was the only thing in the vending machine. Even then, I’d have to think about the benefits of getting in my car, driving to an ATM, driving further to some place that sold another, less objectionable delicacy, purchase it, along with something I didn’t need, like envelopes or ballpoint pens, because as a Fat Girl you can’t just buy candy, and then consume in on the drive back, losing at least half an hour’s billing time in the process. Caveat: I did not have to buy pens for 14 years at one point, because they were my staple ‘get it with the food so it looks like you came in for something other than the goody’ purchase. That’s how much I don’t like Butterfingers. But today, I could not turn my eyes away.

So I left at 4:30, bought a pack of cigarettes on the way home to get the idea of the taste of that chocolate out of my mouth. No, I do not smoke, and no, I do not intend to pick up the habit. But that’s how much I suffered today, and that’s the length I needed to reach in order to stop myself from swallowing the stash whole.

I can take next Halloween off from work, stay in my house exercising or cleaning or doing anything other than rolling around in my addiction and poking it like a novice snake charmer with an angry cobra. I can (and will) chuck the balance of the stash in the garbage-on another floor and far away from me, and I will sit at my desk and think of other things tomorrow. I’m sure there’ll be lingering Trick or Treat detritus around the office, but so long as it’s not sitting with me, I’ll be fine.

In the mean time, I think we should outlaw sugar.

I wanted to outlaw Halloween, but I’m not interested in defending myself against thousands of angry crazies who prefer to ignore the holiday’s actual meaning in favor of dousing their kids with sucrose-coated poisons. I’d be right, but it’d be exhausting, and I’d rather spend my time blogging to you and denouncing the radicals than going 10 rounds over whether little Johnny should be able to dress up in a smothering costume and take his brightly-colored begging bowl around to the neighbors. So I'm going after the last legal drug. Take alcohol, even take cigarettes. But get thee hence, sugar.

Refined sugar is a drug. It attacks your heart like cocaine on the front side and drops you into the pits like quaaludes on the back end. Then you get the munchies, just like with smoke. Ever notice that? Even with the good stuff, you eat something sweet, and you want something more. Sugar is its own breeder reactor: buy now and eat forever.

Sugar attacks your body: apart from the pancreas dump and the blood sugar rollercoaster with Sybil at the wheel, it eats your teeth. Teeth are bones, just as fingernails, claws, and that weird horn on the rhino, are bones. Nothing that eats away at your skeleton should be legal. It certainly shouldn’t be given to children.

Oh, that’s much better. And now Halloween is almost over.

Stay tuned for my November food post, “The Dieter's Guide to Attention Deficit Disorder and....Hey, There's Pie!”

A the S(ugar Free)