Confessions of a Tired Purist

Sometimes I write to remind myself as much as anything else. I'm actually not much of a purist, on any subject. Nope not even when it comes to food.

I will firmly maintain that white sugar and (even more so) high fructose corn syrup are bad for your body and shouldn't have a home in your kitchen. Chocolate, despite media blitz to the contrary, isn't good for you. You crave chocolate when your body us low on magnesium, but the sugar accompanying the good stuff renders it null and void. Go get yourself a bottle of magnesium tablets!

Raw, unprocessed cacao is definitely better for you, but it still contains
enough caffeine to mess you up.

Yet if caffeinate yourself you must, there is a certain order of evils, if you will. Soda pop definitely tops the evil caffeine scale- no, I don't care if it' sdiet, it's just as bad.

Next comes coffee and chocolate. You know my beef with coffee and chocolate.

Next comes teas of all sorts. I recently had a conversation with a 'tea expert.' He mostly explained the physiological difference between the way the body uptakes the caffeine in coffee vs. the way the body absorbs caffeine from different teas.

Well, it was during a sleepless toddler phase- which is still going on- so by golly, I let him convince me. I've been drinking a cup of Yerba Mate, a South American herbal, but caffeinated, tea, on the mornings when I've been up an ungodly number of hours in the dark with John Paul.

An experiment, if you will.

And I must agree, I get no jitters with it, I don't feel super-energized like I do with coffee, even weak coffee. I just feel... normal. As opposed to totally fuzzy and groggy, overwhelmed by my desire to lay down for the rest of the day.

Like I said, I'm not a purist. I'm a survivalist when I have to be. A little compromise to keep a household running and a toddler nurtured.

Works for me.


"Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in."
~Leonard Cohen