I Give Up

For the first time in my life, I am giving up something for Lent. I’m not particularly religious, nor do I wish to have a religious debate on my blog, but I thought that giving up something might be a good exercise in will power and make me more aware of the things that I take for granted.


I decided that until April 23, I will abstain from consuming anything that falls into the category of “dessert” and red meat (which includes beef, lamb, duck, and any game meats).

But I’m a week into this, and lemme tell ya, it’s not easy!

Not eating red meat is really no big deal. I’ve not been much of a red meat eater anyway, mainly due to preference, but the dessert! It really makes me realize how inundated that we are by sweets and stuff all the time. Like getting a tea from Starbucks, I was offered a free ‘cake pop’ (I guess that’s going to be one of their new poor excuses for food? That’s another post entirely). I politely declined, but passing up free dessert (even though I was certain it would be gross) was pretty hard. I had to stop myself twice during the time that the barista was making my tea from telling her that I had changed my mind and wanted the awful things.

And work! If you work in an office, you know how much sweets are provided (well at most offices I’ve worked in). Donuts, Danishes, candies, cupcakes…thankfully, most of it is grocery store bought stuff that I wouldn’t touch even if I weren’t giving up sweets for awhile.

Still, I’m determined to make it, and really, it’s not a big deal. I actually already feel better physically (could be the placebo effect, but I’ll take what I can get!), and I’m already a little more aware that I should probably cut sugar more and more.