Sugar and spice and all things nice

I must confess, it was a bit of a rough weekend on my body. Unfortunately, I was still recovering from it today. I kept up the exercise as promised to myself almost too well. My thighs are aching from an itsy bitsy bushwalk that was only 2 kilometres one way, but vertically straight up. After dangling from tree branches and rocks on the way down, even my arms were aching.

But no, it wasn’t the walk that was bad for my body, it was food (as usual). We had a very social weekend with three dinners and a morning tea. I loved catching up with friends I hadn’t seen for a while, but I wasn’t prepared for all the eating. The problem with having listened to my body lately has been that it just doesn’t need as much as I have always given it. So after an appetizer and entree I was pretty satisfied. It was awesome food too – mud crab from far northern Australia caught my friends. Yum.

Soon after the mains was served, already plated up in the kitchen. The portions were huge and as mentioned, I was already full. What to do? As previously said, I am a plate cleaner and I assume that if you like what’s served you eat until you are stuffed. It is after all only one meal and it would offend the hosts if you only ate half of it say. To me not eating implies that you don’t really like what they have cooked. But what do you do when you when you don’t have any control over how much is put on your plate? How do you avoid offending your friends without eating what they think is a serving?

Well, that’s not the reason why I am recovering either, but it did get me thinking since I will be dinning at friends places again this weekend and I would appreciate any advice for how to deal with oversized portions.

Apart from lavish desserts for 3 days in a row, the final straw came at morning tea on Monday. Some friends caught up over coffee and a platter of delicious sweets. As we chatted for hours, we each reached for the platter of treats many times. I lost count to be honest, but by the time I left, the plate was pretty empty. It was mindless eating at it’s best and my body told me all about it and still is for that matter.

On the way home, I started to feel a bit unwell in the stomach, which I reasoned was fair considering the amount of sweets I had consumed. Apart from the sweets, I hadn’t eaten lunch, but at that point I definitely didn’t feel like any, figuring that I would get hungry at some point later. Gradually the nausea got worse until dinner time came around and I still couldn’t stomach any food. Eventually, I made a vegetable broth just to eat something healthy and maybe settle my stomach. It didn’t work, even though I was hungry and even this morning I woke feeling lethargic, nauseous and puffy eyed. I had never heard of a sugar hangover, but it would seem I had one. Needless to say, I won’t be touching sugar again for a while and if anyone asks next weekend I have a great topic of conversation. Have you ever had a sugar hangover?