sugar free Archives - Eco Thrifty Living

10 sugar free alternatives to takeaways

Zoe — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 10:14:00 +0000

In my household there are two reasons why we would get a take away. The first reason is that we are really short on time – we might be coming back late from somewhere and order it on the way back to save time, or we might be rushing out somewhere and not have much time to cook. The second reason is that we like the takeaway food and don’t know how to make that kind of food at home.

The last time we got a take away was back in December and I decided I really wasn’t happy with the decision to get one and blogged about it here. I have the following problems with takeaways:

They come in a whole load of disposable packaging
I have yet to find one that is sugar, refined carbohydrate and wheat free and which uses only sustainable fish/ free range meat / free range eggs.
They cost money that could be put to better use given points 1 & 2

I haven’t decided to quit having takeaways for ever, but I have put myself off having them if I can think of a better alternative.

Very quick meals to make when short on time

Omlette
Scrambled egg with stir fried courgettes or other veg (chopped into small cubes)
Cracker sandwiches (I used rice cakes with fillings like cheese, peanut butter or houmous)
Couscous (if avoiding wheat there are other types of couscous e.g. barley couscous). This can be flavoured once cooked in a variety of ways e.g. with soy sauce or oil and vinegar or butter or coconut oil. It can be served with stir fried or raw chopped veg, sprinkled with nuts and/ or seeds or you could add cheese, egg, houmous or tinned fish…
Soup – make it in advance and freeze it in portions for when you need it (or cheat and use a tin or packet, but be aware it will probably contain sugar…)

Make your own homemade takeaways

Learn how to make your favourite takeaway meals from scratch and make them at your leisure when you have some spare time.
Once you are an expert, make the sections of the meal in advance and freeze them e.g. if Chinese or Indian takeway is what you are after:

Have frozen brown rice, barley or other grains on standby in the freezer to make a quick basis for a meal (be careful when freezing rice as you can get food poisoning from rice – see the video clip below on how to do it. The clip does suggest defrosting overnight, but I tend to defrost it in a saucepan with a little water and make sure it is piping hot before I eat it).
Make sauces in bulk and freeze them in portions ready for a quick defrost to go with your frozen grains.
Freeze meat cooked as part of other meals in pieces e.g. roast chicken or slow cooked lamb to use in your homemade takeaway.

Make a low effort meal

Sometimes cooking time isn’t a problem, but you need to be doing other things while the food is cooking, so here are a few ideas for low effort meals (once the food is cooking).

Use a slow cooker and come home to a cooked meal (not one for me as I don’t have one, but I’d be interested to know if it works for you)!
Put a baked potato on – it does take at least an hour to bake a potato in the oven, but you don’t have to do anything while it is in there.
Most oven cooked foods that can be taken from the freezer and put straight in the oven are pretty low effort. If you want home cooked chips or roast potatoes you can make them and freeze them in advance to be used another time and you can also make things like fish finger or burgers and freeze them too.

So there are good reasons to avoid takeaways and there are lots of alternatives. I’m pretty sure that I haven’t covered them all and there are still situations where it might just be easier to get one, but most of the time I’m hoping I will be able to avoid them.

If you have a moment I would really appreciate it if you would consider sponsoring My Year of Eco Challenges with an action on my DoNation page. Also if you liked this post please click like on Facebook and follow on Twitter – thanks so much!

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My Sugar Free Menu

Zoe — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 10:35:00 +0000

I think this is the last in a series of posts about being sugar free (unless anyone has any questions for me…). To summarise again – in the first post I wrote about all the unexpected places sugar is hidden in food e.g. crisps and stock cubes (read more here). In the second post I listed 10 reasons why I have quit sugar – did you know some claim it can make you look older (read more here)? Then I wrote about how some simple techniques helped me overcome my addiction to sugar (read more here). This blog post is about what I actually eat, instead of the sugar filled foodstuffs.

For breakfast I eat:

In the summer I have soaked rolled oats (I use water, my kids have milk) with cinnamon, ginger and sunflower seeds sprinkled on them. Sometimes I flavour them with lemon balm from my garden instead and I have some other ideas for flavouring oats here. My kids also have chopped up banana or pear in their soaked oats. Some people soak them overnight (I think the non-rolled oats would need longer soaking), but I find it is fine to ‘soak’ my rolled oats in the morning (i.e. pour on water or milk, mix and eat). In the winter I cook the oats and make porridge.

Other sugar free breakfast options include:

eggs – scrambled, fried, poached – however you like them
Full fat plain yoghurt with fruit pieces and/or cinnamon or other sweet herbs added to it (I make my own yoghurt – see how here),
Cooked quinoa (in place of porridge) – I would also have it with cinnamon, ginger and sunflower seeds.

For lunch I eat:

In the summer I have salads, in the winter I have soup. Both home made and home grown where possible… Instead of adding stock cubes to soup I add homegrown herbs (where possible) like sage, thyme, oregano, lemon balm, rosemary and bay leaves. I also sometimes add freshly ground sea or rock salt, pepper and sometimes yeast extract (which is a key ingredient in stock cubes). I don’t usually add any salad dressing to my salads, although I might drizzle over apple cider vinegar and cold pressed extra virgin olive oil occasionally…

On the weekends when I am out and about with kids I often make myself rice cake ‘sandwiches’. I have fillings like cheese and cucumber, homemade houmous (click here for houmous recipe), peanut butter, cream cheese…(if you want to avoid the plastic tub that comes with the cream cheese, I have a spreadable yoghurt cheese recipe here) I just use rice cakes in place of bread. We always take chopped up fruit and veg with us too e.g. slices of apple, carrot sticks, cucumber sticks and satsumas… I do need to find an alternative to rice cakes though as I don’t like the packaging they come in…

I sometimes make rye waffles (click here for recipe) which I have with houmous or peanut butter.

For snacks I eat:

Apples, satsumas, pears which aren’t too ripe, walnuts, brazil nuts, cashew nuts, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, carrots, cucumber, celery. peppers (plus other fruit and veg as available – in the summer we have lots of berries, mange tout, sugar snaps and tomatoes which we grow in the garden).

Plus I eat rice cakes (other sugar free crackers could work as well) with peanut butter, coconut oil, houmous, cheese and so on.

For the kids usually mid morning I make up a plate of sliced up fruit, veg sticks, slices of cheddar cheese and a rice cake with yeast extract or peanut butter on it and sometimes I join in.

The other day I had a go at making savoury flapjacks, which I like the idea of, but my recipe needs some work…

For dinner I eat:

To start with I ate wholegrains of all sorts, but after a while gave up wheat (I did this because I thought it might also not be agreeing with me and wanted to see if it made a difference – not sure about that yet…)

I tend to make a lot of meals up as I go along, but this is an example of the types of things I might have for dinner:

Roast chicken, roast veg and roast potatoes
Baked potatoes with cheese or houmous (click here for houmous recipe). I do also have baked beans but they do contain sugar…
Burgers, chips and peas (sometimes I make them myself, sometimes I don’t)
Fish fingers (or oven cooked salmon) and chips (as above but probably would have a polenta crumb rather than breadcrumbs these days see my first attempt at fish fingers here)
I used to eat pasta with a cheese sauce (using wholewheat pasta and wholewheat flour in the cheese sauce).
I used to eat wholewheat homemade pizza.
Salmon, broccoli and brown rice (used to have noodles drizzled with soy sauce) – cooked in a 3 tier steamer
Omelettes – I use two eggs mixed with a little milk. Sometimes I add courgette chunks to the pan before I pour the egg in. Then I lay slices of cheese over the top of the egg and once cooked fold it in half and serve.
Stir fried chicken (usually left over from when we have had a roast) and vegetables with soy sauce with brown rice (also drizzled with soy sauce). Soy sauce does contain wheat, but I haven’t quite managed to give that one up yet…
Spaghetti bolognaise or meatballs in a tomato sauce (I started off with wholewheat spaghetti, but now more likely to have with brown rice, quinoa or grated carrot). See my meatball recipe here (might use rye flour in future…) and my tomato sauce recipe here
Oven baked trout with quinoa or brown rice mixed with homemade tomato sauce (and probably with some peas/ courgette chunks / other veg added to the tomato sauce)
Lentils and barley, with stir fried veg (including onion and garlic) with added tomato puree and passata or this lovely coconut and coriander lentils
Very occasionally I do slow cooked lamb with roast potatoes.

Desserts:

Most evenings I tend to have chopped apples, sprinkled with sunflower seeds and cinnamon plus I used to add ground almonds but I ran out of them.

Other dessert ideas include:

Rye waffles with lemon juice (or wholewheat pancakes if you are eating wheat)
Fruit salad
Rice cakes with clotted cream and strawberries
A little bowl of nuts and seeds (at the beginning I had these with raisins before I gave them up)
Plain yoghurt with chopped up fruit
Frozen yoghurt flavoured with a fruit of your choice…

My general rules:

I avoid sugar, sugar substitutes and wheat wherever possible. I allow myself to make minor exceptions e.g. I occasionally have it in savoury food when out and about or at home to keep the peace (read more about that here) or when I haven’t worked out an alternative yet.
I try to stick to full fat foods and avoid vegetable oils where possible (except extra virgin cold pressed olive oil, which has come in a dark bottle and has a production date as well as an expiry date on it – other versions may not actually be 100% extra virgin cold pressed olive oil)
I eat breakfast, lunch and dinner every day, plus I tend to have a mid morning and mid afternoon snack.
I try to have a mixture of proteins, carbohydrates and fruit/ veg in most meals and snacks (I used to have chopped up banana in my breakfast oats – I should really find a replacement fruit for breakfast…)

I know I should probably avoid eating after 18.00, but I never do and also another thing I keep meaning to try is avoiding the carbs in the evening, having veg as as side with dinner instead… I did the Hay Diet for a while and although I don’t agree that proteins and carbs should be eaten separately, I think that having veg as the main side at dinner time and cutting down the proportion of carbs is a good idea.

If you are thinking of going sugar free and none of the food I eat appeals to you, then it might be worth a look at Erica White’s Beat Candida Cookbook, which has over 250 sugar free recipes…

I hope this mini series on why and how I quit sugar was helpful – if anyone has any questions please let me know!

I am currently undertaking a Year of Eco Challenges . If you have a moment I would really appreciate it if you would consider sponsoring me with an action on my DoNation page. Also if you liked this post please click like on Facebook and follow on Twitter – thanks so much!

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How I overcame my addiction to sugar!

Zoe — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 09:54:00 +0000

This is the third in a series of posts I have been writing about sugar recently. In the first post I wrote about all the unexpected places sugar is hidden in food e.g. crisps and stock cubes (read more here). In the second post I listed 10 reasons why I have quit sugar – did you know some claim it can make you look older (read more here)? This post is about how I overcame my addiction to sugar.

No Sugar Substitutes

Right at the beginning I looked at the options for sugar substitutes, but the more I read the more problems I found with every single one of them. Plus I read somewhere that eating sugar substitutes keeps up your sweet tooth and keeps you wanting more sweet stuff. So I decided to go cold turkey on sugar (i.e. refined sugar added to foods) and sugar substitutes. Well mostly cold turkey, I decided I would eat honey, but I only had it in negligible amounts, I didn’t start making cakes and biscuits with it. Plus I still eat some savoury foods which contain sugar as I haven’t quite worked out how to make alternatives for them e.g. tomato ketchup and baked beans…

How I overcame my addiction to sugar

I am probably repeating things here that I have said in previous blog posts, but I think these things are worth mentioning again. When I was younger I smoked for a few years. I wanted to quit though and Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking: Be a Happy Non-smoker for the Rest of Your Life was pivotal in helping me doing it. When I decided to give up sugar, I found that I was able to apply a lot of the principles in the stop smoking book to giving up sugar.

A couple of the techniques from the book that worked for me were:

I took a leap of faith and decided to believe that although I think I like sugar, actually it is tricking me to think I like it, when really it isn’t very nice at all. Ask a smoker if they think cigarette smoke smells and tastes good and they will most likely say yes. They will probably tell you they really enjoy smoking as well. Ask a non-smoker the same question and they may tell you cigarette smoke makes them feel sick… Most people believe that sugary foods are delicious and that they really like them. Give someone who has never had sugary foods before a large bar of chocolate to eat though, and they will probably be sick everywhere…
Allen Carr says smoking is like putting blister cream on a blister, which provides temporary relief and then makes the blister worse. The only way to fix the blister (i.e. cravings) is to stop putting on the cream (i.e.. by stopping smoking or stopping sugar).

Another technique that works for me is the opposite of one suggested by Paul McKenna:

He suggests that you imagine the unhealthy food you want to eat is covered in disgusting things e.g. it has been chucked on the floor, trodden on and is covered in maggots. Then he tells you to imagine eating it to the point where you make yourself feel sick. That technique never did it for me, although I know it can work for some people. I do the opposite. I imagine vividly having whatever it is I wanted. When I gave up smoking each time I wanted a cigarette, I imagined I was having one and I also imagined having the nicotine high from it. When I gave up sugar I imagined that I had a sugar fix when I needed one and I also imagined feeling good after having had the imaginary sugar fix. That way I could imagine having all the good feelings without having to actually smoke or actually eat sugary foods.

An emotional rollercoaster and transitioning to being sugar free.

Going sugar free was hard from an emotional perspective. I started to get a bit paranoid and unhappy but a few books helped to snap me out of it (read more here).

From a practical perspective though it wasn’t so bad as I was already quite far down the road to being sugar free. I tend to cook most of my meals from scratch and one by one had stopped using sauces in jars and made my own. Plus I have been sugar free with drinks for a long time preferring to stick to water and herbal teas with no added sugar. I did drink alcohol though, but over time drank less and less.

To begin with I ate a lot of raisins and other dried fruit, which definitely helped me transition to being sugar free. Every time I was hungry in between meals and short on time I would grab a handful of raisins. I would also eat a lot of fresh fruit – more than I did before I quit sugar. After a while though I quit dried fruit too as it is really very sugary and avoided the more sugary fruits like bananas.

Look out for tomorrows blog post about the types of food I usually eat now that I am sugar free!

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10 reasons why I quit sugar

Zoe — Sun, 05 Jan 2014 18:45:00 +0000

What inspired me to quit sugar in the first place?

I have mentioned this before, but here goes again! I quit sugar back in March 2013 after reading an article in the New York Times on the Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food and realising for the first time that sugar is actually addictive. The article is really worth a read, but if you haven’t got time, a very basic overview, is that large companies spend millions researching how to create products with the perfect taste, texture and levels of sugar, salt and fat. When I say perfect, what I mean is perfectly addictive. The products are deliberately kept fairly bland as too much flavour would trigger us to stop eating. Plus the article suggests that sugar, salt and fat are addictive substances in their own right. This level of spending and research doesn’t just apply to what most people would consider to be junk food either, this applies to a vast range of foods some of which are usually thought of as being healthy options (read more about foods you might not expect to contain sugar, like stock cubes for example – here)

What people say to me…

I have found that some of the people around me don’t really get why/ how I have given up sugar and seem surprised each time they see me that I am still not eating any (well very little) practically 10 months later… Sometimes people ask me how I have lost so much weight and when I tell them I have given up sugar their responses have tended to fall into one of three categories:

It can’t be just down to quitting sugar – you must have done something else as well
Sugar is fine in moderation – you need a little treat now and again
They say that they couldn’t possibly quit sugar themselves.

In answer to no. 1 my weight loss is largely down to quitting sugar (by this I mean processed sugar added as an ingredient), but I do also try to stick to whole grains as well. After several months I also quit bananas and raisins and then wheat.

In answer to no.2 I think that anything is fine in moderation, but if you are addicted to something (and I believe that sugar is highly addictive), then even a little of it could trigger you to consume it to excess. So avoidance is probably best until you are genuinely able to consume it in moderation.

In answer to no.3 I probably wasn’t directly suggesting that they should give it up.

10 reasons why I quit sugar

I suppose though, just by telling people that I have given it up, I am advocating that it is something to be given up and I do think it would be great if everyone quit sugar tomorrow and here’s why:

Sugar has been claimed to be the root cause of the obesity epidemic. I can’t speak for everyone else, but quitting sugar has allowed me to lose around 2 stone in weight – even consuming a little sugar can cause me to put on weight
This article (and various others I have read) claim that eating sugar can make you look older.
Eat too much sugar and you could end up being diabetic.
High blood sugar levels can affect your memory according to this article.
Sugar can rot your teeth. Even after giving up sugar, eating raisins gave me a bit of a toothache. I haven’t had a toothache in months!
From my experience cutting out sugar gives you your tastebuds back. Simple foods taste good again.
Sugar lows and sugar highs = mood swings. I’m much happier and more consistent with my moods these days.
If we all gave up eating sugar, they wouldn’t grow it anymore. We might not be able to reverse some of the damage already done by growing sugar, but we can stop or at least reduce more happening in future!
Avoiding added sugar, means avoiding most processed foods and their subsequent packaging and other dodgy ingredients.
I must have saved a fortune in the last 10 months on all the chocolate, biscuits, sweets, cakes and desserts I haven’t eaten. Plus making food from scratch (avoiding the added sugar) is also likely to have saved me a bit of money.

So there are loads of good reasons to give up sugar and I’m really glad I’ve done it. I can’t tell anyone else to do it, because to be able to give something up it has to be an individual decision. If however you were thinking of giving up sugar, I can highly recommend it!

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Did you know?

Zoe — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 23:28:00 +0000

Did you know that it is very difficult to avoid sugar unless you pay very close attention to what you are eating? Take a look at the labels on most of the foods on the supermarkets shelves and you will find that sugar is high up in the ingredient list on the vast majority of them, whether the product is meant to be savoury or sweet…

It starts at breakfast time.

Most breakfast cereals are full of sugar. There are the ones which you can see the sugar on e.g. Frosties, but then there are the ones which you can’t and the ones which are promoted as ‘healthy’ options. These include Rice Crispies, Cornflakes, Coco Pops, Cheerios, Special K and various varieties of muesli and oats e.g. Alpen, and Oat So Simple. There are some sugar free versions of Alpen and Oat So Simple though – the plain ones or specifically designated sugar free versions. Jordans breakfast cereals are a bit better, but some versions contain sweetened dried fruit (i.e. dried fruit which has had sugar added to it). Even normal dried fruit is very sugary, I used to get a toothache after giving up sugar just from eating raisins.

Toast is also a sugary option. White bread containing refined white flour converts to sugar very quickly once eaten and wholegrain bread is very likely to have added sugar. Kingsmill and Hovis wholegrain bread varieties both have added sugar. That’s before any spreads are added e.g. jam – very high in sugar, peanut butter (you can find sugar free versions, but you have to look for them) and the spread which I can’t quite understand why it is advertised as a great idea for breakfast – Nutella (contains added sugar!).

Many breakfast bars are – you guessed it full of sugar. I don’t know if there are any sugar free versions out there, but some of the ones I looked at contained sugar e.g. Alpen bars.

I don’t know if anyone has yoghurt for breakfast, but unless you buy (or make) plain greek yoghurt, the likelihood is it has had sugar added to it.

There might be organic, seemingly healthy version of these breakfast products, but often they still contain sugar. It just might be in the form of organic sugar, or fruit juice, or dried fruit, or agave nectar or fructose for example. Plus the low fat and flavoured options often contain more sugar than the full fat versions plain versions – Rachel’s organic low fat vanilla yoghurt contains organic sugar for example.

More sugar for lunch?

If it’s sandwiches for lunch, even if you skip the white bread, we’ve already established that some mainstream brands of wholemeal bread contain sugar. If you add a sandwich filling to that, many of them are covered in mayonnaise, which usually contains added sugar as an ingredient. Bagels contain sugar as an ingredient and as part of the process of making them are boiled in sugar water.

Hot lunches are likely to contain refined carbs e.g. white pasta and white rice and sauces e.g. pasta sauce, and curry sauce for example often contain added sugar. Stock cubes may also contain sugar e.g. Oxo and Kallo organic cubes contain sugar, meaning even soup made at home from raw ingredients have added sugar when a stock cube is added. I sometimes just add yeast extract to add flavour instead of stock as that is one of the key ingredients of stock cubes… If you have chips and dip them in ketchup or BBQ sauce or mayonnaise well all three have added sugar (unless you specifically search for and buy sugar free versions).

Even if you go for a healthy salad, the salad dressing is likely to contain – surprise, surprise – added sugar (especially those low fat versions…)

A packet of crisps on the side or as a snack during the day can add to the sugar intake. The ready salted ones are usually ok (from an added sugar perspective), but add a flavour e.g. cheese and onion or salt and vinegar and there is almost guaranteed to be added sugar as an ingredient.

That is before any cakes, biscuits, chocolate bars, fizzy drinks and so on…

Any room left for dinner?

All the added sugar in hot lunches applies in hot dinners. Plus simple meals of Heniz baked beans, or Heinz tinned spaghetti for example contain added sugar (there may be other varieties which don’t). Some burgers may contain sugar and if they don’t, they can always be slathered with a sugar laden condiment….

Desserts are usually expected to have added sugar, but ones advertised as ‘healthier’ and/or low fat options can often have more sugar added – my advice would be to check those Weight Watchers food labels carefully!

Cooking from scratch…

I haven’t covered all the foods that contain sugar and of course lots of foods still don’t contain added sugar – mainly raw ingredients…

My conclusion is that cooking from scratch is the best way to avoid added sugar. Even if you can get hold of a sugar free version of something it probably contains a sugar substitute, which is likely to come with it’s own set of problems.

The next best thing is to go for the full fat, plain (i.e. unflavoured) versions of things e.g. yoghurts, crisps, chips, burgers, drinks and to rigorously check the labels! Plus unfortunately the wholegrain version of branded products often has more added sugar than the non-wholegrain versions.

It isn’t easy, but it is worth it!

Since giving up sugar, I have lost around 2 stone in weight, have more energy and feel less tired (apart from when I stay up late writing blog posts!). If you are thinking of giving up sugar it might not be easy at first, but it is possible and it is definitely worth it!

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A tale of sugar, weight loss and why I’ve been feeling cross!

Zoe — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 21:12:00 +0000

Recently I decided to give up give up eating sugar. I gave up sugar for a number of reasons, but one of the reasons in particular was because I want to drop down to and maintain a healthy weight for the rest of my life.

Weight loss is a very sensitive issue for me. Throughout most of my life I have wanted to lose weight and until now I really didn’t have a clue how to do it and sustain it. For years I felt like a total failure in the area of weight loss and rightly or wrongly – especially when I was younger – I felt that I wasn’t good enough. I felt that people with perfect figures were somehow better than me.

When I became a mother weight loss slipped off my agenda. My youngest son isn’t a baby anymore though and people close to me have started commenting on my weight. My immediate reaction was to tell them to go away, leave me alone and accept me for who I am. I felt as though they were telling me I wasn’t good enough again and to be honest I felt really annoyed. It did make me think about losing weight again though.

My last attempt had losing weight had involved reading Paul McKenna’s book I Can Make You Thin which said

eat when you are hungry and stop when you are full
eat only foods you like
visualise the foods you need to quit in the most disgusting ways to put yourself off them.

I tried to follow it, but I couldn’t work out when I was full at all and my favourite foods were biscuits and chocolate. Was Paul saying I should eat more of them? I wasn’t sure which foods I needed to quit and wasn’t too keen on disgusting visualisations. Not surprisingly it didn’t work for me and in fact I started eating more ‘junk food’ than I was eating before I read the book!

I thought listening to his CD, other hypnotherapy downloads and more recently visiting a hypnotherapist might do the trick, but it wasn’t until I read this article in the New York Times about why junk food was addictive everything started to make sense.

Processed foods, often containing salt, sugar and fat are designed to keep you eating more, so you have no clue when to stop and they can be addictive.
When you are addicted to something you think you like it or even love it and it is very easy to be unaware you are addicted to it. So if you follow Paul’s advice of only eating foods you like, you are likely to stock up on those foods you are addicted to and you won’t know when to stop eating them.
Finally if you don’t know that a particular type of food is a problem then you aren’t going to spend time visualising it in disgusting ways

If there is a food or drink that you can’t say no to, i.e. you eat it to excess, you can’t leave it on your plate/ in the cupboard even when you are full and sometimes you even make a quick trip just to buy it when you have run out, then it is quite likely you are addicted to it. I have finally realised that I have been addicted to sugar and that to change my weight for the better for good, it needs to be eliminated totally from my life.

Although I am really happy that I now understand that sugar is not my friend, I want to know:

Why is the food industry getting away with selling food that is not only really bad for us, but is incredibly addictive so that we can’t get enough of it?
Why doesn’t the government/ health service give us the information we really need i.e. a little of what you like can do you a lot of harm if it leads to a lifetime of addiction! They should set up sugar cessation services alongside smoking cessation services!
Why are people who don’t have perfect figures made to feel so inadequate and then taken advantage of by people selling them unhealthy solutions to the ‘problem’ e.g. diet pills, surgeries, fad diets and so on?

Although I have been feeling a little cross about the above, I’ve decided I’m not going to waste my time and energy on this. Basically the lesson learnt is don’t eat processed foods at all! Aside from the salt, sugar, fat and ingredients I don’t understand added to these foods, these days you can’t even trust that the label is actually telling the truth. Take the recent horsemeat scandal for example! Ultimately I believe that I need to take responsibility for my own life, to make my own choices and decisions and from now on my choice is to buy local, seasonal, unprocessed, whole, sustainable, organic / wild produce whenever possible!

What choices do you make about food? Could you give up processed foods altogether?

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No more sugar for me!

Zoe — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 21:21:00 +0000

In my last post I introduced my new feature The ‘I Quit’ Blog Fiesta where I plan to roundup your stories about quitting things that are doing you, the environment and your wallet no good. In that article I mentioned that I have quit sugar and I promised to write more about it, well here we go!

I quit sugar immediately after reading the following:

an article in the New York Times detailing The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food.
various articles explaining that sugar can make you look older.
The preview section of David Gillespie’s book Sweet Poison: Why Sugar Makes Us Fat (He has also published a book The Sweet Poison Quit Plan (UK Edition) to help people get off the sweet stuff.)

If you do all the reading you will see why I was so put off sugar, but why after eating sugary foods all my life did I suddenly decide that was it – I wasn’t going to have any more?

I had never before associated sugar with the words addiction and poison
I realised that I have been addicted to sugar and was shocked to know that sugar could make you look older amongst a variety of other horrible side effects.
I thought back to when I gave up smoking (I smoked for a few years), I couldn’t just have had one cigarette occasionally, I needed to break my addiction by cutting them out completely. If I have been addicted to refined sugars then to break that addiction I needed to cut it out completely! By the way if you are trying to quit smoking I highly recommend Allen Carr’s Easy Way to Stop Smoking book!
I want to be a healthy weight and have struggled with that all my life. I don’t want to go on fad diets, watch every calorie I eat or exercise 5 times a day. I have long believed that there should be an easy way to be the right weight. Eliminating sugar could well be the answer for me!

You can’t give up all sugar!

I am not planning on giving up the sugar which occurs naturally in foods, it is the refined added sugars that I plan to give up. I am also going to continue to eat honey (in small quantities) for the time being. I do not plan to use any sugar substitutes (other than honey). I know that many savory products contain sugar and I will try to avoid them where possible, I plan to learn how to make my own sugar free alternatives of things like tomato ketchup for example.

Success so far!

Aside from eating some savory foods containing sugar e.g. bread I have been totally sugar free for 9 days! I have lost 2lbs and I am not missing it at all. I have not found it at all difficult to give up and I have been tested. Two days after I gave up I went to my father-in-laws birthday lunch/ tea and there were lots of cakes and sweet foods on offer – it really didn’t bother me.

What has helped:

I finally believed that I wanted to give up sugar as I started to see it for what it really is – an enemy not a friend!
Before deciding to give up sugar I went for a hypnotherapy session prior to which I did mention I would like to lose weight and that I had a weakness for certain sweet foods. I found the session did help me to feel less tempted to eat those foods, but I did eat them again after the session.
I try to get the correct balance of food on my plate and to get portion sizes right.
I mainly drink water. I also drink herbal teas, the occasional diluted fruit juice and wine very occasionally but am considering giving it up altogether.
I make most of our meals and snacks from raw ingredients.
The article in the New York Times indicated that fat and salt can also be addictive – I don’t feel I am addicted to those foods though as I find them easy to resist. I recognise that they could pose a problem though and plan to avoid them as far as possible as well.

Do you think you could give up all refined and added sugars? Would you want to? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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