Why Winnie the Pooh Can’t Wear Pants

Pants? Oh bother.

No. He’s not a pervert. I’ll give you a hint: His sticky paws are on the smoking gun. Yeah, you got it. Honey. He’s addicted to it.

Honey is high in fructose, which Pooh’s poor over-burdened liver is taking out of his blood and storing as fat. Not just any fat, though. Pooh’s big belly shows us that he’s got the worst kind of fat: the dangerous, visceral stuffs that nestles around your inner organs, as opposed to the merely annoying kind that camps out on your thighs.

Winnie the Pooh can’t bear (ahem) to wear pants because he feels bloated and gross. You’d think by now that his weirdly svelte buddy Piglet would point him toward jeans with a “touch of spandex.”

It gets worse. Pooh is not only pant-less but also hosed. He’s on his way to Type 2 diabetes, along with so many of us Americans who are addicted to sugar. The big-bellied masses aren’t addicted because they’re weak or bad people, but because sugar is addictive and in just about everything these days.

Unlike Pooh, I don’t need a fat layer to get me through the winter (I’d prefer a trip to Nevis to cope). Like Pooh, I’m addicted, which is why I’m going to try to go without refined sugar for a year.

A year. You heard me: A year! And I won’t even have the luxury of a few weeks at a rehab center. Just the opposite: I’ll be walking around in world where sugar is now added to soup and you can buy peanut butter cups at the Bed, Bath & Beyond checkout (in case your blood sugar got low while shopping for pillows).

I don’t know about you, but I felt pretty polluted by the holiday season, which has evolved into a sugar bacchanalia that starts in September with the return of pumpkin-spice everything. Here’s a photo of our shelf elf getting sick.

Our shelf elf, Peter, after a gumdrop bender.

That holiday feeling.

I’ve been told that going sugar-free for a year is crazy. Un-fun. Immoderate. And “worse than Navy SEALS hell week.”

Maybe.

I wholly agree that it won’t be easy, but nothing good ever is. I have many, many reasons for this giant N=1 experiment—I hope you’ll stay tuned for those. Thanks for joining me.

PS: And no, I don’t know why Pooh has no genitals. Ask Barbie.