If someone had told me a year ago that I would celebrate the holidays without indulging in a single sugary treat I would never have believed them. I mean, my sweet tooth has been well established for most of my life. I can’t remember a Christmas where I didn’t indulge in all the sweet goodies on offer.

This year was different, there was no Christmas Cake too tasty, no chocolate too delectable and even my Dad’s legendary Pavlova didn’t break me. I watched my family eat ice cream, sweets and every kind of sugary Christmas and New Year treat and I wasn’t even tempted. In fact, it was really odd how un-tempted I was.

Lucky for me, my ninetieth day of sugar free fun was right on Christmas Day and my previous three months of abstinence has resulted in something I never thought I would ever achieve, a complete indifference to all things sugary. The reign of cookies has finally ended.

This is a great thing as it means that I am finally free to pursue this year’s personal development goals unhindered by an unhealthy relationship with sugar.

Beating my sugar demons in the last few months of 2019 inspired me to think about what other things I could achieve that I hadn’t believed I could do in the past. So this year I’m working on creating a development plan focused on ‘transformation’.

In our forties, sometimes it feels that our bodies and mindsets are are on a slow decline towards middle age, in some ways a transformation in the ‘sagging’ direction. I started to think that maybe I could focus on transforming things along a different path. That way, 2020 would be about transforming other things, my fitness levels, my mindset towards food and the pursuit of difficult goals that I’ve always wanted to achieve. A Year of Transformation.

Up until now, the side effects of having a sugary lifestyle have been holding me back from achieving some of the things I’ve really wanted to.  Now that I’ve been successful (so far) in achieving what in my mind has always been the impossible, maybe I can achieve other impossible things as well.

Published by the lean minimalist

Donna Sherriff is a New Zealand based improvement and operations management specialist. Seeing a need for simple, no fuss, improvement advice she started The Lean Minimalist blog in 2017. Donna writes articles offering advice and tips for rapid and sustainable business improvement based on over 15 years in Senior Management roles. Passionate about sharing the lessons of over 20 years on the high performance track Donna offers coaching services to professionals. She also writes about her own personal improvement journey, minimalism, and her life long struggle against the tyranny of cookies and sugar which she overcame in 2020. These days, Donna is pursuing a journey to earn her black belt in Taekwondo after a long hiatus of 16 years away from training. On the side she is an amateur but passionate musician and poet. View all posts by the lean minimalist