Saturday candy?

[abendgules]

Thanks to several months of enforced inactivity, I'm feeling uncomfortably round, and had an unpleasant encounter with a measuring tape recently.

So I'm resolved to get out of the office at lunchtime more often for walks - daily isn't too often - and I'm considering drastic measures, for me: Saturday Candy.

I encountered this at Crown this year in Nordmark - that some good Swedish parents still limit their kids' intake of junk to Saturdays. I'd never heard of something so, so, so....sensible. Sheesh. (Especially when the Western world is staring an obesity epidemic down the gullet - how do the Swedes manage it, when everyone else is so helpless?)

So I'm seriously thinking: I don't eat a lot of candy, but I do like biscuits, particularly at work. I do like a sweet to follow dinner, of some kind. And I don't know if I can follow through, when my beanpole-shaped-sweetie noshes down on his treats in the evening. Could I actually follow a Saturday Candy rule?

(I'm painfully suggestible, I've discovered. Don't remember this always being the case, but by god, if I'm reading about someone enjoying a pot of coffee, all of a sudden nothing short of a pot of coffee will do...similarly when someone says 'I'd love a cup of tea' on TV, etc.)

I was put in mind of it (see? suggestible) by a BBC food article about a family giving up sugar because of a daughter's Type 1 diabetes.

I know a few people who avoid sugar, but why would you substitute dextrose for sucrose (shown in one recipe)? It all turns into sugar in your body, doesn't it?

Comments

[xrian.livejournal.com]

I decided a while back to limit my daytime sweet-snacking to a particular flavor of hard candy. I tell myself I can have two a day and am able to stick to that maybe 28 days out of the month -- on a very stressful day I may eat five or six, but considering they are only about 20 calories each and last a long time (being hard candy), they do a pretty good job of satisfying the sugar urge. And because they're always the same flavor they become really boring after the first two, which deters me from eating more.

The different sugars, IIRC, are metabolized somewhat differently, and -- what is probably more important to a diabetic -- have different effects on blood sugar and on the insulin level. The diabetic diet strongly favors slow-release carbs, and tracks blood sugar and insuln levels very carefully, but I disremember all the details since it's not me who's diabetic (it was my Dad). I also learned from him that the more closely a diabetic regulates their blood sugar, the fewer side effects they have later on -- a counter-example being a dear friend who had a wild and careless youth and died of kidney failure in his 50s.