I...have an addiction..and it's all my mother's fault

I guess this isn't really news, but I realized today that I truly do have an addiction. A serious one at that. Certainly not serious enough to land me on Celebrity Rehab (given that I'm no celebrity and I don't really do anything illegal), but serious to my health, I suppose. I am addicted to sugar. I am! And I know exactly who to blame...my mother.

I was on the phone with my mother yesterday, trying to find out what size picture of Baby she would like from his latest photo shoot at the local portrait studio, and she tells me she's baking cookies. At 5:30. She hasn't even eaten dinner yet, and she's baking cookies. Seriously????? No wonder I have weight issues! On top of that, my mother has the metabolism of a horse. I thought for years that she was pin thin because she smoked like a chimney, but she quit a few years ago (good girl!) when she got pneumonia and landed in the hospital (although she really only quit because she was scared to smoke when she was on oxygen at home for a few weeks). She didn't pack on the pounds like I did when I quit smoking. No, she gained maybe a couple of pounds, but on her, you'd never know, since she doesn't even tip the scales at 100 pounds. No lie. The woman is about 5'10" and less than 100 pounds. She ought to be studied. She eats crap. Total crap. She bakes cookies regularly - and almost always has cookie dough in the freezer. She really just eats what she wants to, whether that's fried chicken and gravy or a hunk of steak or whatever.

This is the same woman who let me eat meatloaf for dinner when I was 3 for an entire year. I ruined the enjoyment of meatloaf for pretty much everyone else in my family. I, apparently, was a very picky eater, and meatloaf was all I would eat. And she let me get away with it. I still fear that Baby will turn out this way - that it's some kind of karmic luck that I will wind up with a kid who is just as difficult with food as I was - but so far, so good with him. And as for passing my addiction for sugar on to him....he was barely interested in his birthday cake, which was the first real exposure to serious amounts of sugar that he's had thus far. We went to another baby's first birthday party this weekend, and that child went to town on his cake. He had frosting up his nose, in his hair, everywhere. Very unlike Baby's birdlike attempts at eating his cake, so maybe he doesn't care for sugar. Fingers crossed.

So...I admit it. I'm addicted to sugar. Now what? Do I give it up? Hell, no. Life is short. Do I try to keep an eye on it so I don't find myself eating cake for breakfast, brownies for lunch and cookies for dinner? Totally. And I'm even going to work on tweaking a recipe for chocolate chip cookies that isn't all bad. OK, it will still be at least somewhat bad (otherwise it would taste like cardboard), but I'm aiming for less calories. Stay tuned, I plan to post the results of my experimentation next week.

TTFN, off to prepare for "American Idol!"