The 'Towards a Sugar-Free Future' Challenge

Honey_Bear

In preparation for Easter Sunday and finally being allowed chocolate again I made some chocolate covered Brazil nuts this evening.  I may have licked the chocolate off the th3rm0p3n and I may have licked the spatula and spoons used to dip the nuts in the chocolate.  And I may have had Tiramasu for dessert tonight.

I calculated how much money I spent per day last year on chocolate and times'd (?) it by 46 (40 days of Lent plus the six Sundays) and it worked out at just under £21.  I had no idea it was that much but I'll donate it at the Foodbank next time I'm in there.

Honey_Bear

That was really interesting.  For the past week I've been fantasising and longing for Sunday so I could crack open my Easter egg, but when the day came I didn't want it! 

It being a weekend I could have some of that homemade lemon curd on my toast at breakfast and that, very, very suprisingly, was enough sugary sweet stuff for me for most of the day.  Belovéd toasted and buttered a hot cross bun at tea time, which I had with lemon curd again - it really is gorgeous - and I thought I'd be feasting on Easter egg by then at the very latest, but I just didn't want it.

I did have three chocolates after dinner but the were the leftovers from a box that a friend gave us when she came to stay in late January, but that was enough.

I think that's all interesting.  Firstly, lemon curd does not taste even a bit like chocolate, but it is sweet and for the past 46 days I haven't been eating very much sugar.  I have had some at the weekends, and I've found lots of things that are not chocolate based that I enjoy, and I have occasionally eaten sugary things a bit during the week on some occcasions, but the lemon curd is an absolute game changer.  It's very, very lemony, but not in the least bit sour, and took eight minutes to thicken in the double boiler.  For anyone who wants to have a crack at it, the recipe is here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/lemon_curd_68499#recipe-tips

I have very occasionally bought a jar of lemon curd (like, twice in my life) but it doesn't do it for me in the way that the homemade stuff does, which I last made when I did a cookery course about 40 years ago.  Very rare for me to rave about a sweet recipe but this one is well worth it.

I will enjoy the Easter egg when I crack it open but in the meantime I think that I have turned a corner and it was Lent that did it.  Abstaining for a few weeks from my greatest weakness has done me an immense amount of good and I'm thrilled to bits with it, because nothing else I've tried over the past 19 months has had such a profound effect.  I hate to say it, but I think the greatest effect came from not having any chocolate at the weekend for several weekends in a row.  I have eaten one of those date and cacao bars occasionally, but I'm now finding them tooth-puckeringly sweet at the moment, which they didn't seem to be before - and I used to eat one of those every single day at around 3.30pm.  I can't any more, but I will still use them for when I'm hiking so that I can get an instant sugarhit when I need a snack, rather than have one every day when I'm not.

L!dl are doing something they call 'protein balls' which are cacao and raspberry, and a packet contains five.  They're sweetened with grape juice, rather than dates, so they probably have a slightly lower fruit sugar content and they absolutely do the business for me.  If I eat all five in one go I can't eat another thing, which is not a feeling I get with chocolate - I can eat that until I run out, no matter how big the stash is.

The reason for putting all of this out there is that I want to let everyone know who has a problem with sugar and chocolate that there are ways of retraining your tastebuds, but it takes time.  A day or two or three or four or five, or a week or a month of over-indulgence is not the end of the world because goodness knows I've done that for the past 19 months time after time after time and I will, at some point - probably not to far into the future - overindulge on a truly heroic scale, but that's something that happens to all of us.  I don't ever want to go back to eating a 200g bar of chocolate every day and not know how to stop doing that, hating myself and feeling shame and guilt about doing it time after time after time.

I could not have gone six days without chocolate when I started this Challenge which is why I started it in the first place, and it's taken a long time for me to get to the point where I can, just for the moment, not long for chocolate all the time and not stop myself indulging that - but I got there in the end.  The fact that at some point over the past 19 months I've gone from not being able to contemplate not having chocolate for one day a week to over six weeks (nearly seven in reality), is amazing, quite astonishing, and means that collectively we have found a way forward that no-one else has managed, other than by going cold-turkey and suffering headaches and other nasty side-effects.  Longterm I don't think going completely sugar-free is realistic or anything other than a complete pain in the bum anyway.

I'm going to carry on with the Challenge because it's working for me, but I am going to allow myself sugar and chocolate this week whenever I want to because I've got an Easter egg downstairs, I've got a small jar of lemon curd left, a pile of chocolate Brazils and it's my birthday this weekend coming. 

After that, when Belovéd is on holibobs for about 10 days with his best and oldest friend that we think is developing dementia so this may be their last chance to enjoy each other's company without having to think everything through in detail first, I'll start to rein myself in, but I'm going to have this period to see how much I've changed my appetite for sweet things without having to think about what I'm 'allowed' and see how much that affects me.  I'm rather hoping I can be a bit less rule-bound for a bit.  After that - back on it five days a week except High Days and Holidays because I know now that it completely works for me in the long run.

How's everyone else doing this Easter?  Thoroughly enjoying it, I hope.

Makingabobor2

Sensible words & advice as always @Honey_Bear. I will take a look at the lemon curd recipe as it sounds like it might be something DH & I would enjoy.  The L!d! protein bars sound good as well. Might have a trip to L!d! this week, as I keep saying I am going to check them out, as not shopped there for a few years now.   Sorry to hear about your husband's friend. Dementia is such a cruel disease. I worked with dementia patients for a few years, and its heartbreaking to see what their families go through. x

Yesterday I had about 4 squares of 85% chocolate,  a toasted choc chip hot cross bun and about 4 biscuits. Far too much I felt. So today DH has come home from work and felt guilty for not buying be an Easter Egg, so bought me a bar of 70% Lindt!!!  Way too sweet, I just don't like it after eating the 85% stuff and still think the Mr S 90% one is best TBH.  Anyway, I think he bought it as he knows it is NOT my favourite and he will get to eat it...lol.  So today I have had a choc hot cross bun & 2 squares of 85% choc I still had in the cupboard.  After that's gone, I am really cutting down on buying them and putting the £1.85 in a savings pot towards holidays.....I know I have said that before, but it didn't work. Also I am only buying Rich Tea or other plain biscuits....said that before as well, and for a while I did, but then I went a bit mad.   The other thing I'm going to start this week is having more protein again and trying snacking on different things, more protein, healthy veg and things like rice cakes.  Also I have discovered that if I get up and do a good exercise routine online or go for a walk, that helps with my snacking cravings. 

Hope everyone else is doing ok. 

SkyChild

Hi all *waves*
So I had a horrendous week, with social services and police interviews or my youngest (turned out to be a misunderstanding but still very stressful) and while I did stress eat a bit, it was carby things like crisps and takeaways, not sugary things. So I guess that's maybe good, in a way?
I have been mostly sticking to one small half glass of fizzy juice with tea if I feel like I want it and no sweets through the day (grapes if I need a sweet hit), so doing well. Agree with HoneyBear above, my tastebuds are retraining gradually - the fizzy juice is tasting too sweet and I am often stopping in the middle of the glass because it's too much!! Great feeling to get to that point of control. 
Anyway hang in there everyone, keep up the good work!

Honey_Bear

None of us have had a particularly virtuous week but that's Easter for you.  When I gave up drinking a few years ago I suddenly noticed how normalised drinking wine on TV had become, particularly for women at the end of a day the dramatists wanted to indicate had been stresseful.  In the front door, straight to the kitchen, pour a glass of (almost always white, straight from the fridge into a very large glass) wine and then taking their coat / jacket and shoes off.  Easter and overeating are synonymous now, the same as Christmas and we're all led to believe that it's normal for children to have more than one Easter egg so that's now become the norm.  It's sort of unfair of us to allow ourselves to think we can over-indulge and it not have consequences.

So, having decided to have a week off from thinking about overeating sugary and chocolatey things, I've learned a lot.  I let myself have whatever I wanted whenever I wanted it, and polished off an entire Easter egg all on my own in very short time and in theory that was all fine, but in practice it was anything but.  I didn't go mad, apart from once, but even so ....

This is a personal account so don't take it as medically significant but it works for me. 

For various reasons I went sugarfree (completely) a few years ago for three months and then didn't have much sugar for a couple of years afterwards.  After that my sugar consumption gradually crept back up and by the time I started this Challenge it had reached a new height - dessert every evening after dinner, and a bar of chocolate pretty much every afternoon. 

At the same time, for nearly 30 years, probably 28 if I want to be exact about it and there are reasons that I do, I've had muscle aches in my legs intermittently to such an extent that it sometimes felt I've been in pain for 28 years and nothing I've tried works to stop it.  I've been for massages, chiropractors, a physiotherapist, taken pain killers but nothing has stopped it - until Lent.  For most of Lent this year I was blessesedly pain free most of the time.

Since allowing myself to have whatever I wanted this week - the pain is back and it's been really, really bad. 

I need to get fit to walk Hadrian's Wall this September and anything over 5,000 paces every day for a week or two exhausts me, but what's really stopping me getting fit is my leg muscle pain, which I assumed was caused by doing too much exercise so I've been very careful indeed about avoiding overdiong it.  This week, towards the latter part of the week, the pain became overwhelming but because we were planning a trip to Wistman's Wood for my birthday which I knew involved a proper walk I rested up beforehand.  I really mind that I've had to think like that for a good long time, years in fact, but needs must.

And while lying awake at 4.00am on Saturday morning, which rarely happens but my legs were bothering me and I couldn't get back to sleep, I started to think about why they were so bad and had been particuarly bad this week and came to the conclusion that it wasn't that I was being sloppy about taking electrolytes or Vit B12, what had changed in the latter part of the week was - sugar and chocolate in particular.  I'd had about a dozen of my chocolate covered Brazils on Friday evening and by 4.00 am my leg muscles were on fire. 

It's not the Brazils.

It's the chocolate, and I'm now pretty sure about it.

I stopped smoking in 2006, I gave up booze about eight or nine (can't remember) years ago and to be perfectly honest - neither of those things have made a jot of difference to feeling well because the leg thing has been a constant.  (I don't miss the bronchitis or hangovers though!)

I'm not going all sugar nazi, I will be having mayonaise, which I love but homemade doesn't keep for long enough for me, and tomato ketchup (which is useful) but for at least a month I'm going fully chocolate free as I did in Lent and nixing biscuits, cakes, lemon curd, sugar on raspberries - the lot.  I will continue to eat homemade bread because I know it's only got one tablespoon of sugar in a whole loaf, but no more hot cross buns for the foreseeable future.

I'm just not going to let myself carry on with this intermittent but debilitating pain without trying to see if over-consumption of sugar is the culprit.  According to some swift and very unscientific google searches it could be, but mostly they talk about joint pain, which isn't an issue for me and they all mention sugar but no-one mentions chocolate which is my greatest weakness. 

I have nothing to lose and everything to gain from this, but it's extreme and I don't want anyone else to think that I think this is what they should be doing - I absolutely don't.  I don't think anyone should go booze-free unless they have a real problem with it which is what the case was with me, but for most people booze is absolutely fine.  Sugar and chocolate are fine for most people but probably not for me at this point in my life.

Just to show how I know it's not overdoing it exercise-wise is the problem - we walked 12000 paces yesterday, which is six miles and by far and away the longest walk I've done since I broke my ankle - my legs did not hurt this morning at all, apart from a little ache.  Defo not the debilitating pain I'm used to, which is an enormous relief because it means I can step up the fitness programme while I cut out sugar for at least a month seven days a week to see where it leaves me.

It's such a relief to know I might, at long last, after years of searching for the cause which has been painful and expensive (even the physiotherapist was flummoxed by it) I may have found the answer.  I've got nothing to lose from trying this, at least.

 

Makingabobor2

Oh @Honey_Bear, I am in total agreement with everything you have said.  Sugar is most definitely an inflammatory, as is too much dairy.  But drs will never tell you that, they still fail to see the connection between what we eat and our symptoms.   I was told I had Osteoarthritis and when I looked it up I found so much info saying that certain foods will make it worse, but when I mentioned this to the dr, I was told it is just wear & tear and food makes no difference....mmmm, it might be wear and tear starting it off, but I can certainly see that more acidic foods will make it worse.                                                                                I have been doing similar research this last week as my digestive problems and Reflux have got worse and I do also suffer from aching muscles in my legs as well...and joints TBH.  I am pretty sure it is all connected to my sugar intake, as this last few weeks has been really bad. The other thing I find is that my sinuses and allergy problems seem worse when I overload on sugar as well, and sinusitis is actually inflammation of the sinuses. So I think we can safely say that sugar ( and dairy in my case as well, as my IBS hates dairy....well and gluten come to that....lol), is the root of all evil.  
So as my whole body feels pretty much out of sorts with it all now, I have decided that I really need to get to grips with it. I have just been out to buy some melon, as I know that is good for reflux and digestion and may also stop me wanting extra sugar as well. I'm going to try and have better breakfasts and make sure I always eat a proper lunch and have snacks on stand by that will be ok....fruit, hard boiled eggs, etc. I am only going to have 1 square of chocolate a week, as TBH, the last few days I feel I have been eating it for the sake of eating it and not really enjoying it. But just had a bowl of grapes and melon chunks and really enjoyed them. 

I do hope you manage to get some relief from your aching legs now and enjoy your walk. How far is the walk you are doing along the wall? That is one I would love to do. 

Another thing you may want to check out is your magnesium levels and I know that not enough of that can cause muscle aches and pains. 
Have you ever checked your body's acidity levels? That is another thing, that happens when we have too much sugar, our bodies become to acidy.  It's  strange how I know all these things and yet it has taken me ages to actually decide to do something about it. Or actually I have decided many times, but just seem to slip off the wagon each time and its not until I feel really poorly with it all, that I realise how silly I have been. 

Anyway, I hope your plan works, I am definitely doing similar and will report back and we can compare notes. 
Take care
x

Honey_Bear

I think we put up with most things for as long as we can Making because we don't want to face up to the fact that we're going to have to make changes.  Changes are tough - we're rarely sure they're going to lead to a solution, it means dealing with habit, it means rethinking things we take for granted, but when it gets to the point that our lives are becoming way too tedious because of the issue, the thought of a simple change suddenly isn't that daunting.

Without this Challenge, starting off very, very gently with just one sugarfree day a week, I couldn't have done Lent.  It's been a very slow process and I'm not a patient person so that would usually not be a solution that would work for me at all but in this instance has resulted in positive changes kind of just happening organically.

I don't expect doctors to have a cure for every symptom we experience and the older I get the more aware I am that lifestyle changes are far, far more effective in managing health than any pill would be, unless there is something very specific that needs tackling.  I wouldn't be without modern medicine for the world but I think we can start to manage our own health a lot better than most of us realise.  I saw Dr Phil Hammond give a lovely talk/performance one evening about all kinds of things and his approach to healthcare really impressed me.  I also like 'Talking with Docs', a Canadian YouTube channel and basically all of their approaches are - You are responsible for your own health.  That's kind of my mantra, and the GP is there for when I have a real problem and they've been wonderful over the years by and large.

As it happens I do take magnesium because it was recommended by various sources related to healing after I broke my ankle, as as that needs a full year to sort out the muscles, ligaments and other soft tissue I won't stop taking it any time soon.

Dairy is my biggest weakness.  It may not agree with me but I wouldn't know because I can't contemplate cutting it out or even down.  I absolutely love cheese, all kinds, and it's my Go To food when I'm hungry, or thinking about what to eat.  I mix it up and eat a varied diet, masses of fruit and veg, but cheese and chocolate have always been my Achilles heel(s).  I've done something about chocolate, it's been posiitive, but I'm still working on it, so cheese stays on the menu. 

I have absolutely no problem with gluten, but I don't eat it every day, much less at every meal.  Some people do, toast for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and pasta or pizza for an evening meal, and frankly a diet like that would overload anyone's system because it's just too much of one thing. 

If, as I think and hope, the sugarfree thing works for the next month and I can go weeks without being in pain, then maybe, just maybe, I may start doing a dairy free day a week to see if that has a positive effect on me, but that's not in my plans at the moment.

I'm pretty sure that each person is highly individual about what works for them and what doesn't but I also know that trying to change too much too quickly is doomed to failure because any change is a huge step, so I stick to one thing at a time.  It's worked for me in the past, whereas trying to do too much at once, like a diet, has always failed.

Change One Thing.

Makingabobor2

You are so right, we do have to take control of our own health. I hate having to take drugs unless its absolutely crucial.   I would always try, rekei, hypnotherapy, change of diet, crystal healing, exercise, meditation etc before I tried drugs,   I gave up most dairy...apart from what's in chocolate.....many years ago due to the IBS issue.  DH has given up most of it now, due to a medical condition he now has, but he likes cheese, so I buy the lactose free one, which doesn't seem to be quite so bad as normal cheese. He only has it the odd times in a sandwich.   
I'll look up the Talking With Docs on Youtube, I love things like that.  When you said "Change One Thing", I take it you listen to Dr Michael Mosely on BBC Sounds?  That is the name of his series. Another great one to listen to. 

Paspatur

@Honeybear I totally agree with your revelation. I am not a sweet person and definitely not a chocolate person but I can track my occassional arthritis type pain in my hands to chocolate.
I thought this for a few years but it was most evident this year when I received a few boxes of chocolates for Xmas
I was having one a day just because I thought I should after someone buying them but soon realised that one chocolate equals sore hands the next day
Easy for me to fix as I just gave away all the chocolates that were left
Luckily I can happily live without sugar, I also don't mean to the extent of sugar in mayo etc.
I have never eaten a hot cross bun in my life and doubt I have eaten an Easter egg for 40 years and I have not drunk fizzy pop since I was a teenager
Maybe it is partly early life eating habits?
Pudding did not feature much in our life, my parents had 6 kids and provided 3 decent home cooked meals a day but puddings were occassional as in sometimes soup and pudding for lunch
Sunday treat of ice cream and jelly
Puddings were rice pudding with sultanas, apple or rhubarb crumble with custard
All of which I would still eat if someone put it in front of me
Give me cheese any day for a treat
Good luck and hope you manage to get rid of the leg pains for good now

TimSynths

Hello all- just discovered this thread- very inspirational. I gave up sugar two weeks ago today and feel great (now), I've also been out @ 6am 6 times so far to walk 5kms, hope to make it more often, hate the cold rain. I haven't weighed myself recently but if I can drop 20kg I'll be happy.