Sugar, that is.  I recently embarked on a 30 day, no sugar detox.  I lasted 8 days.  haha.  To say it was hard would be an understatement, especially for me since sugar is one of my main food groups.  I read, somewhat extensively, about other people’s experiences with a no sugar diet, and thought to myself “I need to do this.”  If nothing else it would make me appreciate sugar even more after the 30 days when I would be able to eat it again.

The first day was not bad, I don’t know if that was because I was busy doing other things and didn’t even realize that iI wasn’t consuming any sugar or if the first day is just easy for everyone.  Days two and three were hell.  Day two was a Sunday, which I spent the majority of the day sleeping.  I usually wake up on weekends the same time I get up during the week, around 6am.  I usually lay in bed until maybe 7:30 but then I am up and about.  That Sunday I woke up at 9:45, feeling like death.  I got up took my dog out and made myself a cup of coffee.  Now I couldn’t add any sugar so I used vanilla almond milk hoping it would sweeten it a tad.  Nope.  So I choked that down and tried to do some tidying around my apartment but I just had to keep sitting down.  By noon I was exhausted, and ended up taking a nap until 4:45, waking up still tired.  My mom called me and it was exhausting just speaking out loud.  I hoped that the next day would be better since I had to go to work.  It was not.

I wake up at 5:45 on monday mornings to be at work for 7:30, for a meeting.  I consumed three, basically black, cups of coffee before 10am, and still was having issues keeping my eyes open.  I barley spoke to anyone, and was half relieved that my co-worker was out of town so I could just sit and be quite.  I finally felt awake at around 1pm, and even then, I had a hard time communicating with other co-workers and it was taking me longer to do everything.  Luckily no one noticed and when I got home I ate dinner and got into bed at 7:45pm.  It was still light outside.  I was asleep by 8:30.

Wednesday, things got a little better, I wasn’t as completely exhausted the whole day and by Thursday I felt like normal.  Now the hard part was actually sticking to it, and not breaking down and eating an entire cake.  I didn’t go as crazy as some people do.  If something had less than 3grams of sugar in it I would eat it, aka milk & quest bars.  To substitute my sugar cravings I was eating a ton of carbs and cheese.  I made some pizza dough that has no sugar in the recipe and made a pizza out of that, to have for lunch a few of the days.  It was really hard to control the amount of carbs I was consuming, and it almost felt more unhealthy eating no sugar than balanced portions of each.  So after day 8, I stopped.  Womp womp.

But this whole thing was not a waste.  I have learned to use sugar and candy as a treat and not a meal.  I can now eat one starburst and be satisfied instead of eating the whole pack just because it is there.  Since stopping I really haven’t binged on sugar, because now I get an awful headache and just feel generally shitty if I do.  Sugar is a crazy thing, it’s the most easily accessible drug on the market.  I hope I am able to have enough self control going into the future that I don’t revert to my old ways.

If you asked me what I though my life would be like at 25, this wasn’t it.  I imagined I would have some high up corporate job, be living in a huge city, in an awesome apartment in a high rise downtown.  The weirdest part is that I didn’t choose that career path at all.  Since childhood I only ever wanted to be two things, well maybe 2.2 things.  They were a zookeeper or a hairdresser.  Except for a brief stint in 8th grade during the career class we were required to take I did my final project on being a secretary.  Way to set those goals high, but that only came about and lasted for the duration of that project, hence the .2.  I ruled zookeeper out early on because I hated the kaki pant and polo shirt uniform.  So superficial coming from someone who at the time wore Arizona jeans from JcPenny and Aeropostale t-shirts thinking they were the absolute shit.  Good lord.

So hairdresser it was.  When I was little I got a real hair mannequin head, the ones they use in hair school, for Christmas one year.  It came with a bunch of rollers and brushes and combs and I was obsessed.  I taught myself how to braid and french braid with it, without the help of youtube I might add at the ripe age of like 8.  I learned how to blow-dry and style hair using it, which now thinking back I don’t know why I didn’t use those skills on my own hair because it was an awful mess until about my senior year of high school when I learned how to use a flat iron.  Again good lord.  Anyways that was my path.  I did all my friends hair for dances at school and I even did the mannequin’s hair in the style I wanted my own for my 8th grade dance.

I knew I still wanted to go to college and have that experience and knew enough that if hairdressing didn’t work out I would have some sort of degree.  My whole 4 years were rough, class wise.  I went with business administration with a concentration in management, so that meant all the math, finance and accounting classes.  I was never good at math, and I don’t know how I passed half of them haaha.  The whole time all I kept saying is “I am going to be a hairdresser, I don’t need to know how to do any of this.”  I didn’t do any internships or any type of volunteer work because, I wasn’t going to try to do anything related to my degree.  That was dumb.

So I went on my merry way, went to hair school in Rhode Island.  Hated Rhode Island.  Left for Denver immediately after I graduated.  I did hair in Denver for a smidge over two years.  The first year was an apprenticeship program which was kinda awful, but the whole time I was being told it would get so much better when you were just doing hair full time.  For me, that was not the case.  I hated actually doing hair so much more.  I took me being unhappy for over a year to actually do something about it.  In August of 2014, I quit.  I got a job working at a Wealth Management company.  It was so stress free and boring, which was the complete opposite of working at the salon.

So now I feel like I am in job limbo.  I have no idea what I want to do with my life.  I worked my whole life towards this goal and dream job only to get there and realize that it was actually awful and not for me.  For the moment I am ok with this.  Not having a direction or end goal is alright for the time being.  Having a plan or timeline didn’t help me that much for the last 15 years, so I think I can function for a second without one.  Here’s hoping!