In November, I gave up some bad things. These are foods of course. Foods and drinks that I like so much that when I start to consume them, I find it difficult to stop. Those SGI Buddhists reading this will recognise that this was my determination, at the beginning of the month.
The three items in question are sugar, alcohol and butter. I haven’t given them up for ever, you understand, but I drank no alcohol in November and had absolutely no butter. Yesterday’s word of the day on qikipedia was the Danish word, Tandsmor: butter spread thick enough to leave tooth marks – literally ‘tooth butter’. The word could have been made for me. What, I ask, is the point of butter unless you can taste it? As for sugar, that was less difficult to eschew and for the most part I succeeded. I say for the most part because at the beginning of the month I enjoyed a Magnum sugar free ice cream stick after dinner on most nights, but Tesco, even though it assures me each week that it has them in stock, latterly substituted Halo Top Vanilla Crunch ice cream sticks in my click-and-collect order, and these, although low in calories contain sugar. But I couldn’t resist.
The ‘diet’ had been so relatively easy that I decided to continue my abstinence into the first week of December. That week, we had no ice cream sticks in our freezer, so I decided to buy some sugar free chocolate, a confection containing the sweetener maltitol.
Trying to be healthy during the day, I consumed a nutritious lunch of cauliflower soup and for dinner, made a turkey chili. So I didn’t feel too guilty that evening, when I polished off a whole 100g bar of the chocolate – after all, it contained no sugar.
I think the resultant brewing sensation in my gut, arose as result of the cauliflower combining with the apparently indigestible nature of the maltitol. By bedtime I was so full of wind that I thought I might combust. Fortunately, Whizz is anosmic (has no sense of smell) but, dear friends, he is not deaf!