Summer is the perfect time to change to healthier eating habits. Fresh fruits, vegetables straight from the garden. Which explained not at all why I was shoving the fifth mini Reese’s cup into my mouth. I poked a little at the trash so that the pile of gold metallic wrappers wasn’t quite so obvious.
For all my strides forward in health and wellness, those wrappers don’t lie. It’s not really even my fault. They were purchased for fancy camping s’mores at the advice of the grocery store clerk who swore we’d never go back to Hershey bar s’mores after trying the Reese’s cup version. Because I have a healthy respect for people who make hyperbolic statements about dessert, we picked up a bag. And used two of them camping; it turns out we’re s’more traditionalists. However, in no way am I immune to the peanut butter chocolate combination. Or really, any variety of chocolate combination. Those red boxes of Queen Anne’s chocolate covered cherries? Love. Them. York Peppermint Patties? Delicious and also refreshing. But it’s the pb and chocolate combo that’s sitting on my kitchen counter.
I’m still checking the sugar content of spaghetti sauce and salad dressing and lunch meats, and choosing the option with the least amount possible, and choosing Heinz Simply Ketchup, even though it adds sugar, but because it doesn’t add corn syrup. I believe those things add up needlessly, and why not choose better when you can. And yet, I definitely didn’t check the sugar content of those Reese’s cups before popping them like candy corn the first quart of summer blueberries. (Okay, I just checked out of curiosity… 23g of sugar for 5 mini cups. That’s literally half the sugar of a soda and it turns out 5 is actually a serving size. I feel somewhat redeemed, even if my redemption is accidental).
And so despite the healthy strides I’ve taken of late, I don’t check the sugar content of Reese’s cups. A Reese’s cup doesn’t have extra sugar just to preserve it to an extra-ordinarily long shelf-life, or to bulk it up because it’s fat free and otherwise tasteless. A Reese’s cup exists for sheer gustatory happiness, and there’s no point in taking that and turning into a stick with which to beat yourself. It’s delicious. Enjoy it. And then move on, and go running in the morning.
When I came in from a morning run one day this week, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that hangs in our front room, and in it was me, and behind me, the mess of arts and crafts and American Girl dolls and piled books of the previous night (or few days, whatever).
Life is a balance of holding on and letting go (~Rumi). Too much holding on, and you’re trapped in a shrinking box of your own making, feeling the air get thinner as it gradually disappears. Too much letting go and you’re in an untethered freefall. Certainly Rumi meant this at levels far deeper than Reese’s cups and messy living rooms. But if you start with holding on to a delicious treat, but letting go of a messy house so you can get outside on a beautiful morning, and lose the guilt about both, I think we’re getting somewhere.
When I first met with a nutritionist last year, feeling pretty miserable and defeated, she asked me what I wanted to get out of changing my habits. I said that I wanted to be able to hike a mountain with my family without bowing out at the last minute for fear of a rolling stomach, without holding everyone else back because I was busy manifesting a ball of white hot fear in my gut. This summer, my family took a road trip through rural, this-exit-no-services America. We went camping and hiking, hiking with the plan of being gone most of the day, just us and nature and all the other hikers. It might not be a literal summit at fourteen thousand feet, but it’s my mountain and it turns out you can eat Reese’s at the top.