Day Twenty-Six: Mmmm. Sugar.

There are very few things in life that I enjoy more than real, white, shiny refined sugar. I love cake, brownies, pie, candy, and most of all, the perfection and magic that is...the cookie. As weird and juvenile as it may sound, cookies are my absolute favorite food. I will never, ever, EVER turn down a cookie that is offered to me...unless I'm feeling guilty about my health. Which even at twenty-four, is something that I need to be conscious of with the way that I eat.

While I try to eat healthy lunches everyday, and healthy, lighter dinners when I cook for myself (my mom's cooking is too damn good for me to care that it might not be as light as I would make for myself), I make up for it by eating refined sugar in between and after meals. The only exercise I get is running up and down the stairs all and between rooms all day at work (which actually isn't bad. It's considered "light" exercise. I look this shit up.). So it comes as so surprise to me that every once in awhile I feel more than a little guilty and need to back off the refined sugar a bit. And it's pretty damn difficult.

My addiction to refined sugar puts me in a pretty bad mood when I put up a fight against it. For awhile, I tried to limit myself to one serving of refined sugar a day (as opposed to natural sugar in fruit, for example). A cookie after dinner, or a piece of Godiva that I've been hoarding since Christmas. That worked for awhile, but I would find myself looking forward to that one cookie a day, craving it, and finding that once I ate it it was gone entirely too quickly. I would pass up pastries and chocolate chip cookies that weren't deemed worthy enough to become my single treat. Then, I gave up. While I'm currently still highly limiting my refined sugar intake, I don't count the sugar on my Multi-Grain Cheerios, or the couple Tootsie Rolls I'll eat after lunch. And aside from caring about my health, there's a reason for it.

My mom recently told me about a book (forgive me, I don't know the title or author) about a cancer researcher who, while researching causes and facilitators of cancer, got cancer himself. He used himself as a model, and determined what in this diet and lifestyle were causing cancer cells to grow. In doing so, he made a very interesting and startling discovery -- refined sugar actually feeds already existing cancer cells. It helps them grow, and actually makes it more difficult for the immune system to fight them off. I was in shock. So while I'm pretty certain (knock on wood) that I don't have existing cancer cells in my body, it could one day become possible, or researchers may eventually find that sugar can cause cancer...or something. But it's already bad enough, so what's one more, slightly scary reason to limit my sugar intake?

This frightening little fact put me in a position I had never been in before. I began to understand what it must be like to be a smoker, in a way. Smokers know that they're doing something terrible for themselves, but they enjoy it, so they continue to smoke. How is this different from eating sugar? Sure, it's probably a lot less bad for a body than smoking, but eating enough of it can cause diabetes, fat, extreme weight gain, and now feed cancer cells. I'm sure if somebody were to heat up pieces of pie in a plastic container in the microwave enough times in their life, it's bound to be bordering on similar carcinogenic risk as, say, a light smoker. I really enjoy sugar, just as many smokers really enjoy smoking. Even if sugar was known to possibly cause cancer, not just feed it, I'm not sure I would eat less of it. Sure, I want to be healthy and live a long life, but I don't want to cut sugar out of my diet for the rest of my life, either. So I guess for now I'll just limit my sugar intake to the really good things, like homemade brownies and cheesecake. And if I get cancer, then I'll worry about not eating sugar.