My Life...only now with no aded sugar!

Let the challenge commence! For one week, I have decided to try and kick my unhealthy “addiction” to sweet treats.

When M, my trainer, set me the “calorie counting” exercise, I was shocked to discover how the largest proportion of my daily calorie intake came from the two treats I allowed myself – one after lunch and supper before bed. I’m afraid these weren’t usually “healthy indulgences”, but more along the lines of cake, chocolate and flavoured yoghurts (all portion-controlled, of course). In fact, my “after lunch treat” was typically a higher calorie load than my “main lunch” (a box of salad with a protein). With my insatiable thirst for knowledge on all things nutrition, I have been reading a lot recently about how refined sugar has replaced fat as public enemy number one. It is almost criminal how much sugar is innocuously secreted into processed food – everything from yoghurt, pasta sauces and bread let alone the dessert aisle. There is increasing evidence that overloading our bodies with readily-available glucose, rather than the more natural complex sugars which take longer to break down and be released, promotes insulin resistance and hence diabetes and obesity.

Just some of my sugar-loaded "little indulgences"...

And once you start looking, sugar is EVERYWHERE. According to the World Health Organisation, we should aim to keep our intake of refined sugar to 25g or under each day. When I totted up the amount in my “treats”, I was often surpassing 100g a day! Surprisingly, it was often the low calorie/WeightWatchers versions that were the worst offenders. Perhaps it’s something you’d like to try – using the nutritional information on your food packets to calculate your daily “sugar load”? You may be surprised…meanwhile here are some examples:

 Galaxy Cake Bar - 13.6 g

Special K "Biscuit Moments" - only 99 calories but 6.8g sugar

Libertie Greek-Style yoghurt 100g - 13.1 g

Cadbury Caramel "Pot of Joy" 70g - 18.2 g

Rolo pudding 70g - 17.4 g

So I have set myself the challenge of seeing if, for one week, I can reduce my daily intake of refined sugar to less than 10g. This immediately puts most of my usual treats off the cards! It will be hard – these are the food treats I look forward to the most all day, the ones which are earned through those miserable hours in the gym on the spin bike and weights. But I want to see if I can, if not completely eradicate, then at least “tone down” my sweet tooth and go on with a little less sugar in my life. Perhaps my mood will be less irritable, my sleep deeper and my afternoons free of the typical sudden energy drain around 4.00 ‘ o clock?

And in with the new....

But I can’t afford to cut any calories out – so how to make up the difference? A milky drink perhaps – but even milk often has a tonne of sugar added – although I have found a good almond milk brand. Nuts, a good healthy choice, but I find too many of these upset my digestion. Cheese? Perhaps a little, but I’m nervous about the high fat content. It’s here that not eating starchy carbs (bread, rice, potato, pasta, etc.) makes things particularly awkward. So I have settled on replacing my after-lunch snack with rice crackers with mashed banana/peanut butter and as for my supper, I am going to be brave and try Weetabix with milk. Although I have struggled with cereals in the past (and porridge is a definite no-no for my innards), a friend of mine at a similar stage of recovery swears by her “cereal suppers” and I found Weetabix to be one of the easier foods to manage when I was in hospital. I’m keen to see how my body responds – will I have maddening cravings? Will I feel bloated and sick? Will I gain weight through having to eat a slightly larger volume of food?

Although I was excited to start this challenge - and invested a lot of time wandering supermarket aisles, checking labels – I’m already struggling on Day 1. Something I ate earlier upset me and now my stomach feels like an inflated balloon and I still have to force those Weetabix down. Not a good start….

….But, as they say on MasterMind, “I’ve started so I will finish”. And I will be posting updates here on how I go. Stay tuned!