Only human

Celebrity magazines regularly publish impossible sounding diets that hollywood starlets are following to keep there size zero figures. These diets are ridiculously low in calories and totally impossible to follow if you have a normal life, or hold down a job and are sometimes outright unhealthy. Unfortunately I think this leads to alot of dieters feeling disappointed and annoyed at themselves for not being to stick religiously to these impossible regimes.

The truth is that we are all only human, including A list stars, and need to be more forgiving if we have the occasional slip up or splurge when we're trying to be healthy. So it's comforting to hear when a celebrity openly admits their food slip ups, as did Alicia Silverstone on her blog. Alicia is infact particularly brave to admit this, given she's authored a diet book called the Kind Diet which is a wonderful book on the health benefits of the vegan diet and includes a chapter on avoiding sucrose and other refined white sugars! It shows us that even the most virtuous of eaters can have their slip-ups, and it's not the end of the world.

Like me, Alicia's weakness is sugar, and she finds that when she allows herself to have some she then can't stop eating it. I have an all or nothing relationship with sugar too, which is why I basically try and avoid it as much as possible. Infact, as I've blogged before, sugar has been found in studies to be addictive and have drug like qualities, so this isn't actually that surprising. Personally I suspect that most people have a sugar addiction, but don't realise it. Even if you're not the kind of person who eats a whole packet of biscuits in one go it's worth remembering that sugar is infact added to most processed ore pre-prepared foods, including savoury ones, so in all likelihood you're eating some at almost every meal and if you actually tried to cut it out entirely you may find it pretty challenging.

For me, the best approach is to avoid it altogether and instead have fruit or agave sweetened treats when I fancy something sweet, like the crumble recipe I blogged about yesterday. The Kind Diet book has plenty of great non-sugar dessert recipes and there are also a few recipes for sweet treats posted on her website www.kindlife.com