24 cherries to better health

I am, taken on the whole, a fairly good eater.  Even at my worst, my diet is a fair sight better than most.  I eat 99% vegetarian; I don't drink soft drinks or eat fast food; most of what I eat is home-cooked from scratch; and my diet contains a very high percentage of fruits, vegetables, whole foods and grains.  Still, despite the value I place on eating well, I find that from time to time I get off track.  Usually this is the result of stress or a prolonged time/energy crunch.  I'm a terrible eater under stress, I admit.  Best case scenario, I have to guard against an eternal longing for sugary and fatty foods, and when the proverbial crap hits the proverbial wind moving device, I often don't even try to resist.  I'm extremely lucky to have the gift of a zippy metabolism, so I've never suffered in terms of my weight as a result of periods of lousy eating.  The ability to eat indulgently and stay slim has been a double-edged sword, however, in that I have also never had to really get down and learn the hard lesson of dietary self-discipline.

The wake-up calls have been coming, though.  First, my daughter.  We have significantly increased the amount of organic food we consume out of a concern for keeping her toxic body burden as low as possible, and it also has curbed, to some degree, those tendencies to drift into slob eating, since I want to set a good example and not been seen eating things I wouldn't want her to eat as well.  And more recently, there's been the upsetting news that my mother has been diagnosed with type II diabetes, already far enough advanced that she is suffering from some peripheral neuropathic damage as a result.  This is sobering not only as it is cause for worry about a loved one, but it also is forcing me to face up to a fairly strong family history of type II diabetes.  Many people in my family have or have had the disease, and many of them have not had a lot of the stereotypical risk factors.  My mother is a good example - she is not overweight and has never smoked.  I've started thinking seriously, then, about prevention for myself - it's a bit frightening, actually, and I am highly motivated to do what I can to avoid the same fate.  Now that I am a mother, it's of paramount importance to me to protect my health, both so that I can be there to mother my child and also to see her grow into her own womanhood.  And when thinking about cleaning up my health, diet is an obvious place to start.

My goals for my dietary reform are fairly simple - to significantly reduce the amount of sweets I consume and to boost still more my intake of fresh fruits and veggies.  Lately, though, I've been a bit off the wagon in general, so it's been easier said than done to not only work on those goals, but to simply eat mindfully and moderately.  It figured, then, that when we were visiting my parents last weekend, they sent us home with two boxes of chocolate covered cherries that my mother wanted out of the house so she wouldn't be tempted to eat them.  Rather than just mindlessly devouring them on this end, I plan to eat one each day, and in exchange for each cherry, I will work a little harder toward my goals, hopefully being much closer to where I want to be by the time they're all gone.  So - four down, twenty more to go.