You'd think from the hubbub caused by Indiana adopting daylight-saving time that a biannual changing of the clocks is equivalent to giving up one's firstborn child.
And even though I know a few people who wouldn't mind giving up their firstborn children, the time change seems to have gone off with relatively few hitches. However, now that everyone's clocks have sprung ahead - and Armageddon didn't result - it's time for many to consider making some more important changes.
For starters, how about cutting sugar consumption?
According to a March 28 article in U.S. News and World Report, annual sugar consumption hit about 142 pounds per person in 2003.
According to author Neal Barnard, quoted in an article on WebMD, sugar is an addictive food. Similar to caffeine and nicotine, sugar activates the brain's pleasure centers - resulting in a sugar high. Caffeine also gives consumers a buzz, and nicotine works its own calming magic on smokers, but none of these substances is particularly healthy.
So if something is bad for your body, why not just cut down gradually, then stop? Anyone who's tried to quit smoking will get a chuckle out of the suggestion of this so-called simple solution. It takes much more than cutting down to make a healthy change in many cases. It takes profound personal determination and willpower.
To underscore the difficulty of trying to quit sugar, I can admit I utterly failed when I endeavored to cut the amount of sugar in my coffee in half for a week. Although the flavor of the coffee was more apparent when it was allowed to peek from behind its usual over-sweetened disguise, the good parts of my personality weren't as visible. The first day went well, but toward mid-week, I grew irritable and impatient with the minor aspects of daily life. Taking out the trash was an incredible hassle. My weekly laundry ritual was excruciating. Routine tasks like tooth brushing and putting on makeup seemed to take forever. In short, my sugar intake might have decreased, but my anxiety had inched up annoyingly.
I had already decided not to use sugar substitutes in my quest because the Food and Drug Administration has come to dubious conclusions about long-term use of sucralose, aspartame and saccharin, which are the key ingredients in the three major sugar substitutes on the market today. I also wasn't planning on using natural sugar, the brown, grainy kind that looks more like something from the background of a "Fraggle Rock" episode than a condiment.
By Saturday of my low-sugar week, I hit the zenith of freaking out over minutiae. After exiting a restaurant drive-through with a tall steaming cup of java, I tasted it and shouted, enraged, "They didn't put sugar in this! I told them to put four sugars in it!"
My passenger, fed up with the hysterics, shouted back, "Then go inside and put your own damn sugar in it!"
That episode drove home the point: Sugar gets into your nerves, it soaks into the very structure of your body, and it doesn't want to let go.
However, the difficulty of reducing or quitting sugar consumption should not serve as a reason for giving up. Just because something doesn't come naturally or easily doesn't mean it isn't worth doing or that life won't be easier afterwards.
It's no surprise to anyone, after all, that too much sugar isn't healthy - it facilitates tooth decay, the development of diabetes and many other negative health outcomes. But with sparing sugar use, these consequences can be controlled or avoided - making it worth the effort.
Write to Marie at mmzatezalo@bsu.edu
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