I don’t drink coffee, but I do drink tea – a lot of tea. On average I drink at least two cups a day, sometimes three or four. I drink tea at home. I drink tea on the road. I drink tea at work. I drink tea at lunch. Black and green tea mostly, but sometimes, if it’s really intriguing, I’ll choose roobois too and hope not to be disappointed. And while my tea selections can sometimes be fancy in name (white chocolate chai, cream earl green, jingle bell) the teas themselves are not spruced up in any which way. It’s just tea and boiling water. And that’s always been perfect for me.
But then something changed…
I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why I suddenly got this strange urge, this never before craving in my head. I don’t know if it was because it was snowy outside and I felt I needed Christmas in a cup, or because I was in the city and all the Lululemon-clad girls surely had Christmas in their cups. I suddenly had to have a Big Girl Starbucks Drink.
But what? I don’t drink coffee. I drink tea. I don’t do sweeteners. I’m not a fan of milk; pretty much, if it doesn’t come in the form of ice cream, cheese, or yogurt I want nothing to do with it. And the intimidation of ordering something fancy, oh man, I turned away like five times before finally getting the courage to approach the counter!
And so, when I finally did order, I ended up with vomit in a cup: unsweetened, hardly flavoured, hot milk – blech! The disappointment was intense. I paid 5 bucks for that, are you kidding me?
I thought that was it, I was off the big girl drinks, I would stick to my teas from that day forward. But then this week, I was again struck by the urge. A girlfriend was drinking a London Fog in my presence, and the way she described it, the way her face lit up at the first sip, oh man, I needed one of those. But the sweetener had me stumped. I don’t know how many carbs there are so it would be a huge, uneducated guess.
The next day, however, salvation. I had a meeting at Starbucks with a fellow type-1 diabetic, who was looking for pump advice as she’d just acquired her first after 4 or 5 years with the disease. She ordered a latté with sugar-free vanilla syrup. What? I kid you not, I grilled her for like the next 20 minutes on what I could order, and how to order it, all the while furiously jotting down notes.
The next day, I approached the barista with confidence (and a cue card full of bullet points on how to order 😉 )
• Grandé
• No-fat
• London Fog
• Sugar-free vanilla syrup
Forget Christmas – this was a unicorn in a cup!
Big Girl Drink: It wasn’t coffee, but it was complicated enough to warrant my name on the holder, and all I had to account for was the milk. 12 grams = BG brilliance.
It was just the belly warming goodness I needed following the day’s COLD lunch run. This run was rife with unmotivated, uncooperative, complaining, devil-on-my-shoulder evilness from the get-go. It was grey, it was cold, I hadn’t been on a run in over a week, my fingers were gonna fall off, my belly was suffering through gastro-disgustingness, I was lost…
Sooo, what do you say run gods? Help a princess out?
…hey, those houses are kind of cute, and hey, I don’t think I’ve ever been on this street, and hey, that’s a park I’d never seen before, and oh, look at that super cute heritage rancher over there, and hey, look at that, I’m done 😀
THURSDAY’S RUN
- 12 p.m. BG before: 8.1
- Temp. basal: none
- Carbs: none
- Time: 34:30
- Distance: 6.18 km
- Average pace: 5:35 min/km
- 1 p.m. BG after: 6.0