After those hoppy holidays...

So, the chocolate bunny festival is over. I managed to be good, mostly, for three days, leaving potatoes and other starches on the dinner  plate and keeping away from sweets. But, as we were not staying at home but visiting with family, I had to accept what they offered for breakfast. Namely, bread. White flour bread, to be exact. And those lovely raisin-filled Easter pastries that you eat with a pat of salted butter.
I did indulge, in moderation. At the time that didn´t even feel too bad.
And then I arrived home yesterday in the evening, and raided the pastry stores. I had a package of four puff pastries I had bought for DH, originally, and I was foolish enough to think I could eat just one.
I ended up eating three of them. Oh well, one I managed to leave in the package, so this wasn´t an unstoppable binge after all. But this morning, I ended up with a three-pound gain from Friday. I know it´s probably part water retention from eating salted foods, but those pastries and the carb-related water retention ought to account for most of it.
The lesson in that? It seems there is no such thing as moderation for me when it comes to refined carbs. It´s not the first time that, after consuming even moderate amounts of them for several days in a row, I find myself hit by an insatiable craving for more that takes several days to subside again.
Which makes me think that those scientists who claim that sugar triggers a reaction in the brain similar to what alcohol, nicotine, or drugs do, may not be so far off after all.
As an ex-cigarette smoker (for seven years now) I have made the experience more than once that, even after a period of successful abstinence, a single cigarette could throw me back into full-fledged addictive smoking. The only way to stay abstinent from smoking, for me, is to never take even a single puff of a cigarette. I can´t even stay in a room that´s full of cigarette smoke if I don´t want to trigger a craving, even though I don´t ever want to smoke again.
And now I find  out that sugar and refined carbs are similarly dangerous for me, and the line between a controlled indulgence and a binge has become narrower.
Not good.
I´ll have to wean myself from those foods again before my eating gets completely out of control.

So, it´s back on the wagon again. Two steps forward, one step back. I have to keep reminding myself that the resulting net movement from that would be forward, even if it´s slower than without that back step.


Julia