Sweet rewards

I crave sugary foods

I dream of lush fields of chocolate mousse, of virgin billowing clouds of tart cheesecake, of the simple wonderful embrace of a just-baked pound cake.

And Indian sweets… aaaaaahhhhhhhh. The intravenous injection of 100% sugar and fat that constitutes most Indian sweets is what constitutes my idea of pure heaven. Crisp hot jalebis, creamy tracts of kalakand, rasgullas that dance with happiness inside your mouth, the crumbly perfection of a bundi laddu cooked in ghee….. these are the things my palate dreams about.

Three or four months back, for reasons to do with vanity, I gave up eating sugary foods. Since then, I have been able to do up the waistband of several items of clothing that were precariously being held across my waist with giant safety pins, so that’s been wonderful. However that’s been the only impact I’ve really felt (apart from the craving, which, though its much better now, was terrible terrible terrible for weeks)

Yesterday I read a blog of someone who seems very put together both as a runner and a writer. In it she wrote that she knew she was a runner because she went to a fair and decided to forgo eating sugary snacks because she knew it would impact her run that evening. And had a wonderful run subsequently, which she declared was sweeter than any food she could have consumed.

How incredibly unfair is that? I have eaten my way through a trillion truckloads of sugar and run my entire life. Then, I give up eating sugar, suffer depression, anxiety, withdrawal and have strangers move away nervously from me in crowded places, since I am leering like a gargoyle at their sweets/ desserts/ ices. I think my reward will come when I junk all my safety pins and can make the two ends of my trousers stretch across the expanse of my waist. Which it does.

But, since I am ignorant of the benefits of not eating sugar for running, I have no expectations of the impact my no sugar diet will have on my abilities ( or lack thereof) as a runner.. And guess what, my no - expectations get fulfilled. Because my running has shown no improvement. At all.

Nil, nada, nothing.

So now I am hopping mad. All this while, even though I thought I was denying myself the pleasures of paradise ( with an extra dollop of jelly on the side) just to lose weight, it turns out I should have been able to run faster, longer, stronger as well. Which I haven’t. Anyone reading my recent posts knows that I have been pushing the envelope on being training - challenged.

And that is soooooo unfair. Just because I was ignorant doesn’t mean that the benefits don’t accrue me.

Someone , somewhere owes me.

I am off to dive into a moist chocolate cake while I figure out who to sue.