Just Desserts

I've made something of a boast since I started this experiment that I haven't in fact eaten a dessert in two years. It's been the source of much whinging and bitching, as longer-term readers will know.

But now I'm forced to consider a fundamental question: What exactly constitutes a dessert?

After all, I've eaten corn bread after a meal, which is only a bread by virtue of a wink-wink convention that stops short of actually calling it corn cake (but which might be a more accurate description of that heavenly creation). I've eaten fruit salads after meals, composed of nothing but...well, fruit, clearly...but haven't classed them as desserts for some reason.

But the issue was rather forcibly brought to mind last night, because last night, I did something new. I had a banana, cut up, and covered in a low fat, low sugar, low calorie yoghurt...

After my main meal...

And suddenly, afterwards, realised that it felt like a dessert.

Now this is potentially dangerous, as anyone familiar with the madness of my perspex walls will understand. The perspex walls principle, for those who don't go back the whole year with me, is that there are things I cannot eat, not because they are intrinsically dangerous or fattening in themselves, but because they lead me on in quick succession to things which are intrinsically dangerous or fattening. I've previously used exactly this example - today I have a low fat yoghurt. Tomorrow, I go and buy an extra creamy yoghurt. The day after, I switch from yoghurt to buying a tub of custard. And by the end of the week, I'm eating four custard tarts for breakfast and a gateau for lunch.

This is not comical overstatement - this is something I have done before. It's not the low fat yoghurt that's the danger, but the place it occupies in my psyche as a dessert. Previously, I have slid down a rapid and slippery slope of equivocation - one dessert's as good or bad as another (even though my rational mind knows this is not the case), and before I know it, I'm up to my ears in whipped cream and chocolate, and so incredibly, briefly, ecstatic that I don't give a damn about anything else.

And last night I had a low fat yoghurt.

To be honest, I didn't actually think about perspex walls when we bought the yoghurts, or when I ate it. It was only afterwards that I felt the danger ot the perspex walls that have, for all their frank and unabashed mentalness, seen me right throughout the first year of this process.

I guess the question really becomes whether, as well as being the Disappearing Man for the course of this year, I might, in some ways, have actually grown too. Have I reached a place of mental safety where low-calorie 'substitute' desserts can just be themselves, without leading me inexorably to equivocation and abandonment?

I honestly don't know.

I can honestly tell you that, while there's always a low-grade atmosphere of sugar-lust around me these days, and that I would love, would truly love, to dive into a whorishly extravagant sundae right now, at at practically every waking moment of every day. But I can also honestly report that throughout the course of today, that sugar-lust hasn't been any greater than normal, my determination any weaker, or my goals for this Disappearing any less achievable. I haven't been hounded through the world in search of chocolate - as I would have been before all this began. So who knows? Perhaps I've reached a stage where, to badly bastardise Freud for you, a yoghurt is just a yoghurt...

I guess we'll see. Incidentally, last night's indulgence clearly had no impact on my blood - woke to see it was 5.5 this morning - picture perfect for a British diabetic.