I don’t have much will power. By way of illustration, I have yet to sort out my wardrobe, having vowed to do it by Christmas. 2013. So, New Year’s resolutions are pretty much an invitation from me to me, saying ‘Dear Oonagh, Please be a massive failure. All the best, Oonagh’ and nobody wants that, least of all the people who would have to listen to me moan about it for the rest of the year. I do, however, want to make some kind of effort just to have something to boast about on Facebook and there’s so much scope for that; I could virtually do anything even half decent and it would herald a better me; it’s one of the beauties of maintaining consistently low standards. This is why I have decided to avoid New Year’s resolutions completely and do twelve ‘New Month resolutions’ for 2016. Surely even I can maintain a change for one month.
Many people are doing ‘dry January’, which involves swearing off alcohol for a month, but I don’t drink the stuff as I’m enough of an idiot without exacerbating factors, and others are doing ‘Veganuary’, which – as you may have guessed if you have the deductive skills of anything more sentient than Donald Trump’s hair – is living a vegan lifestyle for the month of January. The meaner among you may suppose that this involves marching up and down outside butchers’ shops, carrying protest placards, wearing hemp and shouting “I’m a vegan!”, but it really just means living a cruelty-free lifestyle by not eating or drinking any animal derivatives. This is also not an option for me; not because I crave the blood of chickens or have an insatiable desire to attend ‘club your own lamb’ parties, but because I’m already vegan. What I have decided to try and do throughout January is to eat no food that contains added sugar.
If you have ever seen my Twitter account, you may be reasonably convinced that I live on Hobnobs, chocolate, cake and tea, because they’re all a bit of a running theme. You may also be convinced that I have ‘The Bumper Book of Cracker Jokes’ and I’m just tweeting them all for a bet; neither of these things are true. I do eat Hobnobs – which fall into the ‘accidentally vegan food’ category – and I also eat chocolate and cake and I drink A LOT of tea, I mean in ‘the Guinness Book of Records people are on the phone for you’ kind of amounts, but the chocolate and cake are rare treats, partly because I need to find the vegan versions but also because I don’t have much money for treats. I’ve spent it all on tea, hemp clothes and The Bumper Book of Cracker Jokes. Given that I’m not the cake fiend I seem, it should be pretty easy to give up sugar for a month, right? Right? WRONG!
Apparently, there’s a rule that says all food apart from salad and tripe must contain sugar, and I have my suspicions about tripe. There’s sugar in my ‘healthy’ cereal. It’s in most of the bread in the supermarket. It’s in my delicious vegan pesto (that I add to far too many things, if I’m honest). It’s even in salt and vinegar crisps!! So, sugar-free January may prove somewhat trickier than I’d presumed. It took me over an hour to find bread that was both vegan and sugar free, which is why there are eight loaves in my freezer and another on the worktop. I won’t inflict a Venn diagram on you, but if I were to do one of food that is vegan and sugar free, it would have a similar amount of items in the centre as a Venn diagram of ‘Things said by the Kardashian family’ and ‘Things that broadly make sense’. It’s looking as though I may spend January eating fruit, veg, porridge and nine loaves of bread – oh, and ready-salted crisps. I’m beginning to wish I’d opted for ‘New Week’s resolutions’!