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If I were Catholic, I would invent a confession booth for health class teachers. It would be a tiny little box where they could purge themselves of the guilt of knowingly consuming bad food, even if they cannot purge the food itself. These booths would be set up strategically in vacation hotspots across the country, where these offenses are most likely to occur. Just outside the booth--which would feel uncomfortably small, due to the weight gain caused by offending foods--would be a line of other healthy people, furtively glancing around and hoping nobody else sees them there, but taking comfort in the fact that those in line with them blew it, too. When it was my turn to confess, I would start out like this: "Forgive me, father, for I have Cinn(abon)ed. I should have listened to my skinny shoulder angel, who warned me against the dangers of a high-glycemic breakfast; but I chose instead to listen to the tempting voice of my shoulder devil, who, incidentally, smelled like fresh-baked rolls and cream cheese frosting. Which is really almost irrestible." Then, the father--who would probably be someone like Dr. Oz -- would raise his eyebrows in disapproval at my justification, so I would add: "But inexcusable nonetheless." Then he would probably tell me to throw 500 Hail Marys (the football kind) and drink 70-ounces of kale juice to come clean. If I refused to comply, there would be some sort of health-teacher purgatory where you have to sweat to the oldies with Richard Simmons for six months before being released. Suddenly, kale would seem appealing.
The offense occurred at the end of my most recent vacation. The hubs and I had traveled to Las Vegas to spend time exploring Sin City with his family. There are plenty of sins to be sinned there, not the least of which is gluttony. You don't find many cities boasting of a place like the Heart Attack Grill, where they keep an EMS staff ready at all times to cart off any ill-fated customers, and give free food to those weighing over 350 pounds. Truly, I find the whole concept abhorrent, and extremely ironic, since Vegas is also the home to some of the most incredibly fit people I'd ever seen in the Cirque du Soleil shows. In general, my eating habits fall somewhere between Heart-Attack-Grill-bad, and Cirque-worthy good. While I don't *expect* myself to eat perfectly on vacation, eating an entire Cinnabon was a pretty egregious offense. And I paid for it dearly, with an almost-immediate sense of mental fatigue and fogginess and an irresistible desire to sleep every second of the first two legs of our return flight. In short, I experienced typical responses to a severe glucose spike.
Today, I had the courage to face my demons and find out how much damage that gooey monster really did. I knew it would be bad when the carb content was a three-digit number. My "It's vacation" indulgence was a doozy. In fact, I gasped audibly when I saw the nutrition facts, proving that my skinny shoulder angel is still alive and well. Turns out that Cinnabon's manufacturers have managed to cram the calories of two slices of pizza, along with the sugar content of two Snickers bars into that one little roll-in-a-box! And the 13 grams of protein do nothing to combat the astronomical glycemic load of 78. No wonder the hubs said he had never seen me that exhausted. My body was basically using as many resources as it could to process that bad boy, which is why I had no energy whatsoever. That, and my brain thought it was drowning, poor little guy.
I hope and pray that I am not the only one who has ever blown it this bad. If you've never eaten a Cinnabon, don't. It is so much easier to resist forbidden fruit if you've never tasted how good it is. I consider the hubs entirely to blame for introducing me to Cinnabon, and if they ever do invent a health food confessional, I'll be sure to throw him under the bus along with my sweet-scented shoulder devil. But, if you have ever indulged in a Cinnabon or anything else with a GL equivalent to four slices of pizza, consider these top three coping mechanisms, which are guaranteed to work at least as well as a confessional booth, and don't pose the threat of Richard Simmons in spandex:
1) Walk It Off-- Any sort of aerobic activity increases your insulin sensitivity, giving your body a fighting chance of processing at least some of the influx of glucose effectively. I probably should have done laps around the airport terminal instead of checking my Facebook before boarding. Or run another half-marathon on the Tarmac. *That* might have been just enough to level me off!
2) Share the Blame-- Nothing lightens a glycemic load quite like sharing an indulgence. If the hubs and I had split that delicious temptation, I might not have slept through nearly four hours of flight time; though, considering the in-flight movies were not complimentary, I'm not sure how much of life I truly missed out on. Regardless, I would have put my body through half as much stress, and probably been able to write more of an advice column than a confessional.
3) Overcompensate-- True story: One of the top doctors in my company actually chugs a glass of this fiber supplement whenver he knows he's going to have a slice of cake. The fiber slows down the entire process of converting food into sugar, so that cake isn't *quite* so detrimental to his system as it would be otherwise. The biggest mistake you can make is "saving your calories" for something bad by passing up an opportunity to consume something good. Without good food to taper the effects, your body actually reacts to the bad choice more severely than it would with a little fiber or protein in its system.
So, until they invent the health-nut confessional, the next time I overdo it, I think I'll take my own advice and do something good for myself. And I'll probably try to avoid big errors like this in the first place, because I would really hate to run into Richard Simmons. That seems like punishment enough for anyone.
