Tomorrow is Valentine’s day and as everyone in Japan knows, it’s the time when people spend billions and billions of yen on chocolate and chocolate-like products overly wrapped in paper and ribbons made from Canadian trees. Throngs of women crowd into the confectionary shops all over Japan to get their “giri” (obligation) and “honmei” (true love) choco for the male population. Shari has a post about V-day in Japan and I’m sure Ricky will be posting about what he got this year from his students like he does every year. English teachers in Japan get lots of chocolate. I was going to go out and take some photos of this madness but unfortunately I’m too busy tonight. Instead I will ruin your choco experience by introducing a wonderful book that I’m reading.

Get the Sugar Out is a diet book that focuses on how sugar is bad for you. It’s been around for a while now (published 1996) but I’m just reading it for the first time. Now, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that eating donuts and chocolate bars is gonna make you fat. But this book goes into detail about all the different health problems attributed to too much sugar in your diet and describes how there’s tons of sugar hidden in all our food as well as in food marketed as all-natural or low-fat. The book is divided into 501 bite-size tips on how to reduce the amount of sugar we consume and offers suggestions for dealing with sugar cravings. For example, everytime you look at a food label keep in mind that a teaspoon of table sugar is about 4 grams. Then calculate how many tsps of sugar are in one serving of whatever you’re thinking of consuming and imagine that number of tsps of sugar being shoveling into your mouth. As an example, a can of coke has about 40grams = 10 tsps of sugar. Do you know anyone who puts 10 tsps of sugar in a cup of coffee?

The book suggests eliminating sugar completely from your diet for 2 weeks to see how your body reacts and determine whether you are a sugar addict. This will be very difficult for me to do. Japan is a wonderland for anyone with a sweet tooth. Just visit the basement of any department store or “depachika”. It’s like Willy Wonka down there!! Rows and rows of confectionary shops selling pastries, cake, chocolate, cookies, cream puff, anything you can imagine all in one place, and pretty girls selling them too. In Tokyo, there’s a convenience store every 50 metres so you can easily get a Hagendaas fix anytime of day. Glico offers a service called Office Glico where a delivery person will bring a big plastic box full of pocky and other junk to the office for your late afternoon sugar fix. People bring omiyage to the office all the time and you have to eat whatever they give you out of politeness.

Since I’ve come to this country I’ve become incredibly addicted to sweets and crave all kinds of things like pudding, ice cream, cookies, you name it. It’s a miracle that I haven’t become a type 2 diabetic. I hardly indulged this much when I was younger and living in Canada. Could it be that Japanese food is saltier so I crave sugar after a meal? At any rate, Valentine’s day is good a time as any to start on my no sugar diet.

If you’re seriously thinking about your health this book may interest you. On the other hand if you’re interested in the getting some really nice cake, I suggest you visit the basement of Mitsukoshi in Ginza for a great selection of both imported and domestic confectionary. Isetan in Shinjuku is my number 2 recommended place. Whenever friends visit Tokyo these places are always on the tour. Just writing this post is making me drool. Excuse me while I go suck on a cinammon stick.