Yesterday, I turned 59 years old, just in case you missed the national celebration. Don’t worry; so did I, since there wasn’t one. 😉
With it came my 7th annual angst-fest over whether or not I really wanted a birthday cupcake. I love cupcakes! Especially ones that are more frosting than cupcake. I don’t even really consider myself to be a big lover of sweets, but cupcakes? Just YUM!
Spoiler alert: I didn’t get the cupcake. And it’s probably just as well, because that tasty explosion of sweetness on my tongue is short-lived, and not worth the three years it takes for me to undo whatever damage all that sugar and flour does to my system. A moment on my lips, a billion years on my hips, or so it seems.
It’s not that I don’t feast on occasion. Allowing myself the occasional food vacation, whether it’s for just one meal or for the duration of an actual physical vacation, happens occasionally. But right now, I am a mere 2.6 pounds above achieving my 200 pounds down initial goal, and I have stopped short of claiming that goal far too many times to let myself get sidelined by something as innocuous as a cupcake. There are a billion things I like better, anyway.
Like last Sunday. Hubby and I drove to a nearby botanical garden and strolled around for over four miles. It was a gorgeous day, and we saw everything from huge colorful arrangements of fall mums to a chipmunk to a snake hubby nearly stepped on in the nature preserve. The only downside for me was that I should have worn better shoes, and I ended up rubbing a couple of blisters on my toes. But otherwise, it was a leisurely time and we were even home with plenty of time to hang out for the rest of the day in the backyard.
It wasn’t so long ago that I wouldn’t have been able to do that, or doing it would have exhausted me for anything else. If I had been able to do it at all, I would have been grouchy because pain in my knees would have taken my focus away from the beauty around me and I would have been ready to go home — or sit on every bench I came across — long before seeing much of the gardens. I would have been sore for a long time afterward, as well.
I didn’t get to this point in my health by looking only at the short term rewards, and things like cupcakes are definitely that. I know the price of a cupcake for me. It’s the hunger the sugar spike causes. The water weight tied to glycogen stores in my body from the sugar. It’s the battle to get past it to what I really want: the sweeter ability to claim much larger accomplishments that are back within my grasp.
At some point, on some future vacation, that cupcake will be mine, but I’d rather have the 200 pounds down. This year, that cupcake didn’t win, and I did.