self-talk when it comes to sweets. You know what, though? It is 100% in your head, and you can change it.

After stomach surgery, I was on NPO for a couple of weeks that I remember. I was in ICU in a coma for more time before that, and I don't know how long it lasted, a week to ten days, I think. A long time without food in my stomach at all. Then I could only eat tiny amounts of bland foods for over a month. It wasn't ordered, just the way it was. I kept wanting to eat sweets, and they tasted awful to me. Just awful. Way overboard on the sweet and nauseating.

I was determined to get back the relationship I had previously had with sweets. I tried eating different sweets for over a month, finishing most of them even though they tasted horrible to me, before my taste buds and stomach could tolerate small amounts of sweets. Of course, it eventually grew to a rabid addiction again. I was crazy not to leave things as they were when I no longer liked them. I wasn't craving the sweets, I was craving eating them and the feeling I got from them, not the food. I have had to do a lot of work on my thinking since then. I still haven't won, but now I recognize it and have some coping methods to shut down that inner child. Even so, they don't always work. The sweets still win sometimes. The sad thing is that a lot of health issues are showing up that are totally sugar-related.