I’ve been writing my book for a bit. And since a few of you have kindly asked, it’s coming along well,  in fits and spurts. I’m not sure how many of you have written something as long as a book, but GOSH IT HURTS. It drags up very challenging aspects of one’s self that one has managed to keep nicely safeguarded by routine and distractions and working for other people.

The biggest challenge I’m having is with my authenticity. Digging deep enough to be totally real. It’s easy to write stuff that’s clever or impressive or appealing to a particular audience that you might have conjured. Words can be wonderful cloaks.

I like this quote from J.D. Salinger about how he gets  in touch with his authenticity so he can write his best:

“It takes me at least an hour to warm up when I sit down to work…Just taking off my own disguises takes an hour or more.”

Some days it takes me most of the day. Then I have I flourish of truth at around 4pm.

But to be square with you: The book is a sort-of-memoir, sort-of-philosophical reflection, sort-of-guide-to-getting-well.  But I want the book to reflect where we’re all at. I want it to be about stuff that we all connect with and connect through. And this is where I thought you might be interested in getting involved.

Can I ask for your help? I’d really appreciate it, if you had the time.

Would you mind simply sharing any thoughts prompted by any/all/one of the following questions:

Honesty corner: I’ve been trying to cheat the system and find a way to eat sugar-free chocolate. A cup of tea and chocolate at 3pm. Real tea. Fake sugar… sadly it’s tougher than the idea suggests.

I figured there had to be one out there that was OK.

The fake chocolate scenario:

• Loving Earth chocolate  contains agave, which is 90 per cent fructose. Which is not what you want to be eating. Health food shops are awash with agave-sweetened, “sugar-free” products. Be very aware!
• Cocoa Farm chocolate is sweetened with Maltitol which is one of the common sugar alcohols. More on them in a minute. But note, they’re bad.

So are any fake sugars OK? Yep.

• Dextrose and glucose are both pure glucose, containing no fructose, so your body will detect it and process it.
• The “maltos” – maltodextrin and maltodextrose. These are another variant of glucose, in a longer chain of molecules. When they hit your saliva, they break down to maltose, which is digested as if it were pure glucose.
• Lactose – the sugar in milk products. Again, no fructose and surprisingly sweet once you’re off fructose.

This is a list, from David Gillespie’s “Sweet Poison Quit Plan“:

I’m a Gen Xer, a child of the 70s, and oh, don’t I just love to tell young folk how much better it was when I was a kid. I’ve reached that age.

Me. Late 70s.

I came across an interview with Salon’s Heather Havrilesky. She’s just written a memoir, “Disaster Preparedness,” about being a child of the 70s and in an interview, when asked what her overall take on such experience is, she says this:

The first thing that comes to mind is the fact that you opened the door and let your dog run into the world and then you called it to come home and you pretty much did the same thing with your kids.

Ditto. My parents shoo’d us out of the house on weekends and left us to work out life on our own until the next meal time. Mum and Dad were vaguely interested in what we’d been up to. Mum paid no attention to scabs and cuts on Sunday evenings when she lined us up on the veranda and scrubbed our knees and cut our toenails ready for school. We had relative independence and took responsibility for injuries along the way.

I don’t think helicopter parents existed back then.

What comes to mind for you about  growing up in the 70s/80s?

This week I run in weird frog shoes

I think it’s a particularly Australian thing to not want to appear too earnest when partaking in sporting pursuits. Blaring lyrca and customised sweats make you look like you care too much. Which is fine if you’re the best. But anything less? You’re a try-hard. I mean, what could be worse than being accused of having “all gear and no idea”?

For this week’s column I succumbed to trialing possibly the most earnest sporting accoutrement on the planet: Vibram FiveFingers, those odd little foot gloves made from rubber that allow you to run barefoot without getting glass or twig injuries. They were originally designed in Italy as a non-slip boating shoe, but a few years ago were adopted by the rather parochial and fast-growing barefoot running community. You might have seen such folk about at your gym, down at the park, running past you in a marathon. And you might have thought, “Cripes, what an earnest little frog-footed person he/she is!”.

Well, I’ve turned into just such a person. You know, it’s lucky I offloaded my pride long ago (shortly after I wrote about getting a colonic and just before tap-dancing out of a plane with Sir Richard Branson for this column). Adjusting to the FiveFingers takes a good few months and Australia’s Vibram importer Max Delacy from Barefoot Inc told me I must walk around in them as much as possible until my feet strengthened. I wore mine walking through the city to meetings, to the supermarket and into a pub when I had to drop something off to a friend. I got looks. But I held my head high.

Since I was four I’ve worn glasses. Before hipsters wore glasses, being a four-eyes wasn’t cool. It wasn’t like wearing braces. You were ostracized not so much for having a defect but for looking bookish and – god forbid – intelligent. At my bogan school it was rad to be slightly dim.

I think I became a nerd from wearing glasses. I was never bookish, but spent a lot of time on my own in the library. It meant I had plenty of time for homework. Glasses also force a certain aesthetic upon you – a slightly awkward, intense, reflective one. I’ve worn it as a guise ever since.

But yesterday I was told I didn’t need glasses. I’m affronted. Threatened. I already feel naked. My ego is attached to being different via my glasses, bold enough to wear them, not-caring-enough about what others think. I wear big, brash glasses, unapologetically. This has become my stamp.

But when German vision trainer Leo Angart visited me he took one look at my eyes and told me glasses were not required. He identified my eye issues in one glance and said  that he could fix them with simple muscular exercises in….weeks, if not days!

I’m a four-eyes because I have:

One of our readers Mia sent in the link to this site.

Sugar Stacks uses sugar cubes  (4grams/1 tsp) to show how much of the white stuff is stacked up in the guff you eat. Little bit shocking…

(40% more caffiene than coke, and 15% more sugar. Scary stacks.)