Must overcome addiction! It all started a while back, when Ed & I were going to do something for the day with the Whelans on their sailboat. It was my job to stop by the local Dunkin Donuts for coffee & sandwiches for the interested parties. Ed requested a coffee, light & sweet. I figured I'd give it a try as well.

OK, so that was a mistake. If you want to know what I'm talking about, go to your local DD and order a light & sweet coffee. If a surly teenager with her name on her gold hoop earrings or an overweight white woman with a moustache is the one that helps you, rather than a kindly Indian woman, take a taste before you leave. It should taste warm, sweet & wonderful. If it doesn't, add some sugar! Seriously, even my friends who do not like coffee liked this.

A couple of years and, oh, I dunno, 700 coffees later, I am having a hard time feeding this addiction.

It's not the caffeine that I'm addicted to, nor the caffeine that bothers me about the whole thing. It's the fact that light & sweet means extra cream & extra sugar. It makes for a helluva good cup of coffee, but also makes for, what, a 250-calorie cup of coffee? I haven't done the math, but don't really want to.

I've done much better, and have gone from having my sugar bomb coffees nearly every day to twice a week or so. (More this week, considering I have pretty much let myself go since Shannon's visit, despite the fact that she behaved pretty well while she was here. Argh.) But still, this mental addiction to something warm & yummy to start out my day is here, and it's annoying.

Case in point: the other day, I had the last cup from the work coffee maker. It was bitter and horrible. I dumped it out, and went for a yerba mate chai tea. That would have been fine, only I had used the last of the real sugar in my horrible coffee and had to use Splenda in the tea. Yuck. I dumped that out too, and went to Dunkin Donuts for my daily fix on my lunch hour. See? It's sad.

Well, I'm enjoying my last Dunkin Donuts for a while tonight. I figure that coffee + cream + sugar has no regular place in a healthy diet, and I am back on my Quest for the Size Six as of tomorrow. I seem to be right back to the way I was eating long ago, which means I think I have to go into deprivation mode for a bit. That seems to train your body into wanting good, healthy food. Long ago, I used to love pizza and all other things cheesy & bad for you. Then I made myself eat well for a while. Then, instead of craving enchiladas and garlic rolls when I was having a fuck-it-all meal, I instead wanted Thai. Sadly, I'm now back to wanting the bad-for-me food. I usually resist, but wanting it is hard. Blech. It's annoying to keep trying and trying and not seem to get anywhere, but, then again, giving up doesn't seem to be the way to go either.

Back to drinks, lucky for me, as aforementioned, Pixie makes a really yummy yerba mate tea flavored with chai spices. A little bit of soymilk and a little bit of sugar and you have yourself a lovely little drink.

Sadly, I got the ones that I had as a sample from work. Now I have to find where they actually sell it. Don't bother trying another brand; I did, and it was horrible.

  ¶ 12:18 AM