How I Overcame My Peanut Butter Passion
Beyond PB
It is 3 am and I am standing in my kitchen in the dark. In one hand a jar of peanut butter, in the other a spoon. This could be a normal and healthy late night snack, if I stopped at one spoonful but I know that if I do and go back to bed, I’ll just get up again and have another. At least that is what I tell myself as I go for my third table, not tea, spoon of one of Nature’s great foods.
Now I know that peanut butter is a good food to eat, as long as you use it in moderation, whatever that means. It is even a food that someone, like me, who has Type II diabetes can eat as long as the amount that is consumed is controlled. Therein lays the problem.
I love peanut butter and have eaten it on everything from apples and hot dogs to my ultimate favourite, peanut butter and cheese on whole wheat bread. Is there anything better?
This peanut butter passion or perhaps obsession is a better word, may not have been a problem, if I was not already overweight and finding it difficult to shed the pounds that somehow unknowingly appeared upon my body.
My weight and my health are linked, intellectually I knew that but matching my knowledge to my actions was more difficult than I had anticipated when I was first diagnosed with diabetes.
Then I vowed to exercise and watch what I ate. This worked well for about three months and then I gradually slid back into unwise patterns that help me keep the pounds on and my blood sugar too high.
Every now and then I would go on a health kick, start a diet, and an exercise program; none lasted more than a few weeks. I can’t count the number of times that I swore I’d never buy another jar of peanut butter as if it was all the peanut butter’s fault that I was overweight.
One day as I was going through the check out counter at the local supermarket, I discover that some how, a large jar of peanut butter had found its way into the cart. Did I refuse it, no, home it came, only to be empty five days later.
Later that night, around three Am., while scooping out a second spoonful of my favourite snack, I suddenly knew what I had to do. It was a two part plan. Part one involved exercise. Now that had never worked in the past so what was going to be any different this time.
That was simple. It had to be something that I liked and could readily do three or more times a week for at least 15 minutes.
Walking; I love to walk; to feel the wind and the sun as I wander around my neighbourhood.
Now my usual saunter was not going to do it.
A quick search of the Internet lead me to power walking, not race walking, which is something quite different, but walking at a pace and in a manner that creates effects that are similar to jogging.
The second part was, or so I thought at the time, the most difficult, no more peanut butter. I took this one step further, no bread, no white rice or pasta, which was also passion, but that is another story.
It is six months later and I have lost 15 pounds, power walk 3 times per week and not a spoonful of peanut butter has crossed my lips.
What has sustained this change is my desire to live long and prosper with my wife of 25 years at my side; my previous path would have made this difficult. We spend hours each day talking and it is in the sharing of our separate days that we flourish. Growing old together is one of Life’s great joys.
