You know fall has arrived when you walk into the stores and see pumpkins everywhere. In my area the pumpkin craze started the minute September began. The first week I went grocery shopping there was a little display of some pumpkin coffee and some pumpkin flavored candy, week two that display doubled, now we have pumpkin cereals, muffins, cakes, pies, cookies and more. I love pumpkin so for me this was pumpkin heaven. I could not believe all the items that contained pumpkin. Yes I filled my cart with almost every kind of pumpkin item I could get my hands on. This is my thing, pumpkin is good for you so hey that cookie can’t be that bad for me can it? When I got all my pumpkin goodies home I was so excited. In my house you very rarely find any type of sweets and goodies, 99% of everything I buy is healthy. I spend hours at the store reading labels. So what happened this time? Suddenly my nice healthy habits go flying out the door. I bought things that I never ever buy just because they were pumpkin. I even bought pumpkin pie pop tarts, are you kidding me. What on earth came over me? Was it the way they displayed the items, which was the thing you first saw upon entering the store. I don’t know, all I knew was it is pumpkin season and this limited flavor got the best of me.
It has now been a couple of weeks since I went on my pumpkin happy high. Yes I even ate many of the items to see if I liked them. Let me tell you a true fact, pumpkin is very good for you but and I mean but in most of the items I purchased the goodness of that pumpkin was outweighed by the badness of everything else in those items. My body was on overload from lots of unnatural ingredients that I had shoved into it. After going on pumpkin fix I decided to read the labels of the stuff that had in my system reeking havoc on me. This was a wake up call because once I had read all this I have decided that I would no longer be swayed by the stores shameless marketing of the pumpkin. Most of the items had high fructose corn syrup in them, in my house that is a number one no no. Most of the items also had at least 5 ingredients in them that I could not even pronounce, let alone know what they were. Most of the items had more saturated fat in them than a meal at McDonald’s. Most had more sugar in them than I would normally eat in one month. The list goes on and on.
I have to tell you I did enjoy a lot of those items and I would have probably been ok if I had ate them in a lot more moderation then I did. One thing it did prove to me is that I am only human sometimes you need a little binge to put you back on track. Luckily for me my time off track was only a couple of weeks. My body was the thing that paid the price for my pumpkin love and beings I am not getting any younger I will spend the next month getting my body back to normal. I know for a fact that by eating all those sweet goodies my body started craving them and it made it very hard not to run to the pantry to satisfy those cravings. So you think I would have learned a lesson here and I really thought I did. I went shopping at Trader Joe’s this past week because they carry a lot of healthy foods that I like. They also jumped on the pumpkin band wagon. As I was heading to the checkout I noticed a display that had pumpkin Kringle on it. I had never heard of Kringle before and so I had to check this one out. This one had no artificial anything in it but it was not a healthy item by any means. Did I just walk past this item and stick to my cart of healthy food. Honestly, no once again my brain was influenced by the name pumpkin. This time around we did do a lot better and made our Kringle last longer then the other items. What can I say but welcome to pumpkin season.
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