The first week of going cold-turkey where refined sugar is concerned is always the pits. I’m hanging in there, and happy to report that I haven’t caved, despite my Asshole voice rolling out every trick in the book in an attempt to cure me of the ridiculous notion that I can live without it.

Wednesday brought its own unique brand of torture. I was working in Birmingham, and one of our recruitment partners had very kindly offered us their office space to do some interviews. The room was lovely, with tea and coffee all laid out, together with a plate of biscuits. And I’m not talking just any biscuits…these were Choco Leibniz biscuits. My favourite. There’s something about the buttery crunchy biscuit base and the thick slab of chocolate sitting on the top which makes me want to lock lips as soon as I clap eyes on them.

I could tell you now exactly how they were arranged on the plate, because for the three hours we spent in that room I was barely able to focus on anything else. There were six of them. Four were arranged down one side of the plate, chocolate side up, and two were in the middle, chocolate side down and leaning against a pile of bleh biscuits which occupied the other side of the plate.

Did you know that the long fluted edge of a Choco Leibniz has fifteen little chocolatey bumps on it? And the short edge has eleven. I fantasised about biting into each and every single one of them. Or resting my tongue in between one of those little chocolatey bumps, and resisting the temptation to lick so it’d last for the longest possible time,  just waiting for that sweet chocolate to melt and explode onto my tastebuds. Or best of all nibbling all the chocolate from around the edge first, before dunking the middle bit in my coffee. For three hours those thoughts wrestled for pole position with everything else going on in my head.

They almost drove me mad, but I didn’t have one. It was warm in the room we were using so we had the window open, and every now and again there was a suggestion of a breeze which carried the scent of them right to my nose. I could feel myself sniffing the air like a lion with an antelope in it’s sights…shit the bed I wanted one so badly. But I left all six on the plate.

And last night, I went out for dinner with three very good friends. We’d picked the restaurant carefully, and researched the menu before we went so we were all confident that we could stick to our respective food plans. And that was fine, except as we were seated, dessert in the form of baclava was delivered to the table next to us. Oh you have no idea.

I could see the crispy filo pastry ready to flake stickily as someone bit into it. I could see the crushed pistachios on the top and the gleam from layers of sticky awesomeness. I think all four of us let out an involuntary variation on ‘Mmmm…I love baclava‘ as we collectively stalked every mouthful taken by the folks who’d ordered it. Three of us are on the same journey in terms of getting the food demons under control, and we had one much-envied string bean in our midst who has to fight just as hard as we do to stay there, you know?

From my perspective, if just one amongst our group of four had voiced the words fuck it, I’m ordering baclava,  I think we all would’ve jumped on the bandwagon. I came this close. It was a bit like being in a baclava-related scene of The Voice, with me and my friends in the big chairs waiting to see who’d push their buzzer first and get first bite before we all turned our chair around. Happily none of us pushed the buzzer for baclava but just because I didn’t, doesn’t mean I didn’t think about it for the rest of the evening, or that I’m not still thinking about it now.

*Sigh*…it’s all work in progress, right? I stared temptation down twice this week, and every time I say no, it gets me a little more skin in the game.

Day five of being refined-sugar- free in the bag…come on day six, let’s see what you’ve got 🙂

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