Esquerre Athletic Coaching: A spoonful of sugar helps the sugar go down.

Sugar, sugar, sugar. Sugar has been haunting me for the past couple of weeks now. A couple of months ago my wife was the pioneer in the family who decided that she wanted to consume less sugar. Not too long after, the rest of the family followed suit. I think the only person who was already on a restricted sugar diet was our toddler. Aside from her we all needed an intervention.

Before we cut back on our sugar I really don't know how much we were consuming but I would say less than the average person.

I had already stopped adding sugar to my coffee and started drinking it black. We are not a soda family at all so that wasn't a problem. We don't keep candy or eat a lot of sweets so we were good about that too. Of course sugar has snuck it's way into everyone's diet whether you like it or not.

Most of the things in this picture we had already eliminated or greatly reduced. All in all we were doing good until we actually paid attention to the amount of sugar we were consuming and tried to decrease it even more. Guess what folks... sugar is addictive! Not until I tried it get rid of it did I start to CRAVE it. Suddenly I wanted it all the time. And we can't help it, it's all part of who we are as humans to want to have more of the sweet stuff.

So I gave in and at the start of the holiday vacation my family and I went all out. We baked cakes and made cookies and baked more cakes, we wanted sweets and we wanted it NOW! It all came to a head when I made a dozen vegan carrot cake cupcakes this past week. Surprisingly the recipe didn't call for as much sugar as I thought it would but it was still more than we needed.

What you are seeing, ladies and gentleman, is the last hurrah of our sugar soiree. These are (were) the remaining cupcakes leftover from the dozen I made. These cupcakes were so damn good we thought about them constantly. We had to pace ourselves otherwise all of them would've been gone the first night. We thought about the cupcakes in the morning with a nice cup of coffee or tea, and at night to treat ourselves for the day. All that was on anybody's mind was those damn cupcakes. So yesterday we said that this would be it. After the last cupcake we would go back to eating less sugar.