Day 5: In Love with Fruit

Monday April 18

We’re having friends over tonight and my husband went to the grocery store to get a few things for our dinner (there are advantages to having your husband laid off work that you may not have considered.) One of the things on the list was to pick out any dessert for our guests tonight. He came back with ice cream AND a huge fresh fruit plate for me overflowing with melons and berries. I was ecstatic. I set to work on nibbling on it right away. He really gets this idea that saying no to one thing will only work if you say yes to something better. But I hadn’t talked to him about that and he didn’t read what I wrote yesterday. He was just being thoughtful.

Did I mention that I’m allowing myself to eat fruit? Some Atkin’s diet enthusiast who picks carrots out of salads will likely corner me at some point and tell me that this whole experience will be “fruitless” because I’m including fruit. I intend it to be a very fruitful experiment; full of fruit and still productive. And picking carrots out of salads is just...weird.

Here’s the thing. I know that fruit has natural sugar in it, but this is my experiment and raw science doesn’t know everything. If some study claims there’s not that much chemical difference between the white stuff I’m avoiding and the natural sugar found in fruit that I’m still eating, I think that the study left something out. The world God made is complex; my body is complex. The awful experience of addiction that I have with the white stuff simply doesn’t happen with fruit, not to any degree. Whether or not science has a full explanation, I have the experience of how my own body works.

After taking a bit of cantaloupe, I don’t feel like I’ll die if I don’t have more. I am able to delight in it in moderation. I might eat another piece, or I might put the rest in the fridge for later. Maybe this how the non-sugar addicts feel about cookies. With fruit, it's pure delight without any unwieldy cravings for more. It’s a freeing experience.