My Name is Natasha and I am a Sugarholic

I haven't posted for a while because last week I got sucked into a swirling, treacle-black hole of kids' birthday parties and road trips that threw me out the other side older, fatter and definitely not wiser.

It started last Wednesday.  I threw a Hot Wheels (a.k.a. "Ho-Chi-Weos") party for my now-four-year-old and his classmates at school.   Brazilian mums delegate sugary edibles, including the cake and ubiquitous trays of brigadeiros and beijinhos, to the local bakery.  I decided to cater myself, producing a very British spread of chocolate-crispies, egg-sandwiches, cheese-straws, jelly, popcorn and a home-sculpted race-track cake.

More fool me!

Four year old children, as it turns out, are not interested in broadening their cultural horizons and experimenting new forms of party food!  For three whole days we breakfasted, lunched and dinnered on 'very hard brigadeiros' (how the children referred to my chocolate crispies) and dejected cheese-straws, by which time it was time to throw birthday party take-two, in Sao Paulo, for friends.  More leftover cake;  More leftover crispies; Each bite bringing me one sugar-rush closer to popping the button on my jeans.  I just couldn't stop myself.

By Sunday morning my binge was in full swing.  We met friends in Frutaria Sao Paulo and I indulged in the sugar addict's hair of the dog: ice cream for breakfast.  The breakfast buffet included not one but two flavours.  Amora (a type of blackberry/mulberry) and avocado.  Yes, you heard me right, avocado ice cream for breakfast.  In Brazil that's how you eat avocado; sweet (but for breakfast?  That was news for me.)

At the point at which I went to lick my bowl, I recognized that I had definitely fallen off a wagon somewhere, and have since been scrambling to get back on.   Four days ago I quit sugar, cold turkey and took up exercizing like a mofo.  Today's calorie burning activity was skating along the Flamengo beachfront.

Even without sugar, life here is sweet indeed.