Lent or No Sweets for Kiera, Day 33-40

Easter!  YAY!!  What do you know, Lent really is 40 days.  So...really I gave up last week and had a TON of crap this week.  All kinds of candy, I made chocolate chip toffee cookies, bought donut holes, molasses cookies, chocolate caramel filled eggs, cadbury eggs, peeps, jelly beans, etc...and I made a cake.  Needless to say I did not lose any weight this week.  So what have I learned from all of this?  That next baby I should totally do this the first six weeks instead of binging during my last six weeks of guilt free eating.  That it really is possible to go without sweets and when you're in the middle of it it really doesn't seem like such a hardship.  You hear other people saying they couldn't do that and you reflect on how sad it is that we are so dependent upon sugar that we feel physically/mentally unable to go without it for any real period of time.  Of course, then you give in and have some and it's suddenly very hard to go without again.  I've also learned that I will lose weight like nobody's business if I lay off the sweets...but they are very satisfying on a psychological level sometimes.  A treat is a reward you give yourself for accomplishing an unsavory task, it is a common element that helps strengthen bonds in a relationship as you share a special sweet together away from others, it is a moment of solace in a chaotic and deafening world and it relaxes you when you're tense.  Of course, substitute "sweet" for alcohol or cocaine and you have a serious problem.   Something to think about I guess. ;)

This is my zen/philosophical reflection pic...

Lent or No Sweets for Kiera, Day 26-32

Yeah I suck.  I was planning to get right back on the no sweets horse come Monday...but I went grocery shopping instead and gave in to the temptation to buy these cute Little Debbie snack cakes that were all pastel and sprinkled for spring/Easter.  There were 8 in the pack and I think I at four and a half of them.  This was incredibly stupid not only because I was not supposed to be eating sweets but also because I know, and I mean I KNOW that eating more than two of Little Debbie anything will make you sick to your stomach.  So after my third I was not feeling too hot but I still went back for more later in the day.  Bah.  So then I thought I'd start again...I think it went okay for two days.  Thursday I decided to try the two day fast thing I've done in the past to get rid of the four pounds the cookie dough incident of the previous week had added.  (It's not actually a fast as you drink a slim-fast type mix drink for meals and if you get too hungry you're allowed to eat apples or bananas.)  This went pretty well except the drink was chocolate flavor.  So chocolate at all was a definite no no but that was the kind I had.  This made me feel like I was cheating the entire two days even though I wasn't really eating any "food."  I finished up Friday night and went to see The Hunger Games with my friends (it was pretty good).  Afterwards we went out and I broke my fast about twelve hours early and got food...and a dessert.  At that point I decided that the whole Lent thing was pretty much down the tubes.  So Saturday after Patrick attended the priesthood session of conference in Sherman I asked him to get me a strawberry shake.  Today I made chocolate chip/toffee cookies and ate WAY more than my fair share.  I will make a token resistance against sweets this week, but there are only six days left of Lent and I think I've pretty much blown it at this point.