Hey everyone!
I want to share with you something really interesting that I discovered by chance when browsing YouTube. It’s a Swedish tradition called Lördagsgodis which means Saturday candy, and it’s the day of the week that children (and adults too, I think?) indulge in sweets. This basically helps keep their teeth healthy and also prevent cravings! Here is the video I watched about it! I also mentioned it in the online Women’s Circle I’m in, and a Swede commented this:
“Lördagsgodis is a very common thing here in Sweden (it means “Saturday candy”, maybe they said in the video). I dare say pretty much all of us grew up either having that ‘rule’ in the family or having many friends who did 🙂 I don’t know what the youtube video you watched was about, and I suspect it might have been more focused on adults and how to deal with sugar cravings and/or discipline etc., but generally Lördagsgodis is a rule parents use to make their kids eat less sugar and only allow it one day a week.”
As some of you might understand, I really struggled with sugar cravings and was eating way, way too much of it – barely any protein or veg, forget about minerals and other nutrients. And after having to get several teeth fillings last year, I became serious about dental health. So when I watched that video, I thought “why not?? I’ll give it a try. I have nothing to lose!”
It’s been two months now that Joel and I have tried the tradition, except we made ours Fredagsgodis (Friday candy) since it fits our schedule better. The first few days were really hard since all I could think about was sugar! But then it was easy for several weeks, until the middle of April when Joel and I sort of snapped and ate sweets for a few days in a row 🙈 But we got back on track! The problem was that we had leftover sweets in the pantry and it just got too difficult to ignore them. As James Clear says in his book Atomic Habits, we need to engineer our environments to make the good habits easy and the bad ones difficult. Willpower is rubbish. Why fight the urge to eat chocolate that’s shoved to the back of the pantry or ice cream that’s in the freezer when we can just let it be easy by not having it there in the first place? So we did the classic “eat it all in one go so it’s gone” strategy which actually helped tremendously 😆
Doing this new one-day-a-week thing made me realize how addicted to sugar I am. Sure I decided not to keep it in the house, but there have been times when I was at the store and thought, “there’s nothing stopping me from getting sweets now!” as I mentally shake my fist at the sky. But, something crazy I noticed almost right away after trying this tradition was that I found more joy and excitement in anticipating eating the sweets. I would get so freaking hyped to eat ice cream and chocolate and drink dessert lattes, but then when I had them it was sort of disappointing, like, that’s it? I also felt weirdly pressured to eat as much dessert as possible on Fridays to get my fix. I would think I needed to eat a week’s worth of sweets in one day which was just dumb 🙈 But the habit/addiction part would kick in and I’d still keep eating the sugary stuff even though it wasn’t meeting my expectations.
It’s reached the point where we feel like poo on Friday nights, probably because our sugar tolerance has decreased so much. So we asked ourselves why the hell are we still doing this haha. It’s not even fun anymore. We end up feeling like we’ve been tossed in the bin. So we’re going to keep sweets and baking for special occasions, holidays, and movie nights. I may be a Virgo sun, but I’m also a Cancer moon (translated: highly health-conscious but also a lover of comfort food).
For those of you who are interested, I would love to recommend an incredibly eye-opening and enlightening paper written by Weston A. Price (it’s also published in book-format). It’s called Nutrition and Physical Degeneration and covers the lives and diets of primitive groups all over the world. So far I’ve read the section about the isolated and modernized Gaelics, and next I’ll read the section covering the Swiss. The text covers an amazing amount of topics that are all interrelated. I really, highly recommend reading some of it!! Here’s the link. It also talks heavily about the effects of modern food on dental health, which is how I found the text. While I’m not an advocate for fear-based motivation, I have to admit that reading the text shook me into reality and made me realize how shitty some of the foods I was eating are, even though I thought they “weren’t bad”. It helped clear my perspective of modern diets and how most of the food that’s all around me all the time is just absolute shite 💩 Even the hospitals here in the US have junk food vending machines.
But anyway, I think I’ve gotten out all I need to! It was really nice to get all of this out of my head and into writing 😊 I hope you found this post helpful! Thank you so much for reading and I hope you have an amazing day or night!
Julia 💙
