The 'Towards a Sugar-Free Future' Challenge

cookie02

Good morning!  I managed to stay sugar-free yesterday so I'm happy with that.  I'm hoping to be sugar-free today and tomorrow as well.  Today, I have dates as my back-up snack.  

Morning_walker, Picking a mini chocolate bar is still a better choice than a full-size one and will help you reduce gradually - well done! . It takes time and a big part of it is due to have our tastebuds have become used to sugar.  Once that shifts, the healthier choices will start to taste sweet.  If you haven't read JackieBlack's post about fruit, that might be really interesting for you.  JackieBlack has cut out sugar for health reasons and was commenting on how sweet fruit tastes to her now.  

Personally, I lean quite heavily on dates for those 'I need chocolate/cookies/cake' moments.  These are just the unbranded variety and they taste so jammy.  I make myself stick to one or two at most as they are high sugar but they are natural and have other benefits (fibre etc) so it is better than me reaching for chocolate or cookies.  Honey_Bear also suggested pate as a snack and I have that and/or cheese sometimes, especially when I hit the dreaded afternoon dip.  Then there are the date/cashew bars which are definitely worth a try... 

Honey_Bear said:

Without the workarounds I'd be caving left right and centre.

This really is the key part!  Figure out the times and things that lead you to want the chocolates / cakes etc and then have a back-up plan.  Don't beat yourself up if you indulge - we all do it and it is just part of the process!  Thank you for the Nigella recipe, I hadn't seen that.  I have a variety of ingredients and I'm really looking forward to experimenting on Friday .  

Honey_Bear, I hear you re: the flapjacks - the only reason I know I won't gobble the lot is thanks to my family who won't let me! Funnily enough, I have had more offers of 'help' for flapjacks than I get for other experiments .  How did yesterday go for you?  I didn't realise the minty choc had palm oil in until you mentioned it a while ago.  I don't like the minty version but I've always loved the non-minty one and we have also given that up here (along with Nut3ll@ and various other things).  Unfortunately, palm oil is hiding in all kinds of things so I'm not sure how successful we are in avoiding it altogether but, where we know it is there, we have been trying to at least check that it is the sustainable type.  I can't remember if I mentioned this before but Ic3l@nd is one of the main supermarkets that has been addressing this properly.  

Today is looking pretty busy so that means I'm more likely to meet my sugar-free goals.  Fingers crossed!

Have a great day and good luck with meeting all of your goals this week  .

cookie02

Hello!  Just a quick update: I made it through yesterday sugar-free.  I'm quite pleased with the three days this week.  The longer we do this, the less painful it becomes.  I'm already feeling like I want a cookie now (probably a combination of poor sleep and being a bit stressed today).  I'm going to try and stay focused.  I have more dates so I hope those will be enough to keep me on the right path!  

The weekend is almost here and I'm already looking forward to Friday... It's v reassuring to know that the 'Friday feeling' doesn't disappear when you retire .  

Hope everyone is doing well this week.

cookie02

I almost slipped up yesterday but I had a couple of dates and managed to stay on track.  That means that I've hit four sugar-free days this week.  I'm in shock but very pleased  

Today, I've been sugar-free so far but I'll be doing my flapjack experiment later.  I'll also be having sugar over the weekend but I will try to keep this to a moderate level so I can get back on track more easily on Monday.  Honey_Bear, Morning_walker, I hope you have been meeting (or getting closer to) your goals this week . 

Hope everyone has a lovely weekend 🎉 

Morning_walker

Congrats cookie02 that's great! I have had a challenging week, so the sugar-free approach has gone out the window. My new goal is to do sugar-free Saturday as a manageable first step. 

Honey_Bear

How's it going everyone?  I'm okay so far this week, but it's Friday evening that's usually my downfall. 

Honey_Bear

Well that's weird.  I didn't get any notifications about your posts Cookie and Morning Walker, hence my post yesterday.  I usually get told straight away when someone's posted so I'm not sure what's happened there. 

Hang on in there Morning Walker.  This is tough, but only really to begin with.  I've been trying to have sugar-free weeks for years, and have managed once or twice here and there, but the rest of the time I always caved after a day or two.  That's why I didn't start off doing more than one day to begin with, and to be entirely  honest there were some of them early on when the only way I got through was to tell myself I could have sugar tomorrow, but not today.  When I went up to three days I had to do two days, have a sugar day and then the final sugar-free day because I couldn't do three days in a row.  As Cookie says, it gets easier but it really is tough to begin with.  If you really struggle with it it's worth considering being sugar-free until lunchtime one or two days a week until that seems do-able, so for the whole of the rest of February would be a good start, and then tea time for a couple of days a week before stepping up to more than one day.  That way, if you cave on one of them you can have another go later in the week.  Building up is much, much easier than trying to go all out, I promise.

Well done on your successes Cookie.  I was surprised not to have received any notifications because your posts are the ones that always tip me the wink that there's activity on the Thread - I should have checked but I was being lazy.  And there you were, going great guns so well done.

Thanks for the tip about lc3@nd.  I didn't know they were giving palm oil the bum's rush, and I'm really happy to hear that someone is.  I'm very suspicious of 'sustainable' anything, so I try to avoid it in everything.  Belovéd loves Fairings, a type of gingery biscuit which is very easy to get in the southwest, but the makers have been putting palm oil in which used to be labelled as vegetable oil apparently, so we didn't know - I wrote to them to ask them not to use it and they told me they always had.  It's the food ingredient laws being tightened up that made us all realise how ubiquitious it is.  I read labels when I'm shopping and an awful lot of stuff gets put back straight away.

I was doing really well until late last night, but I've realised that Friday evening is the start of my weekend so I'm just going to go with the flow on that.  In the past I've eaten something sweet on Sundays in particular simply because I'm allowed it, rather than because I really wanted it.  I think I'm going to allow myself Friday nights and balance it by not eating sugary things unless I really want something on Sunday afternoons, and if a date bar would work then I'm going to have one, rather than some of Belovéd's biscuits.

Who was it who posed the question about when did treats become a daily thing?  Someone cleverer than me, much earlier on in the Thread.  That question has been ringing round my mind pretty much ever since, because thinking back to my childhood we didn't have chocolate every day, and chocolate biscuits weren't a daily thing either.  The problem is, they have been for me for a few years, although I was off sugar for a few years before that so that's what I want - to get back to sugar being a rare treat.  I'm not there yet but I am getting there. 

The weight is very, very slowly coming off, 100g here and 100g there but the scales don't stay stable - this morning I'm 400g heavier than yesterday but I was down 600g the day before.  Overall since mid-August I'm 2kg down and that's stable - at my heaviest I was 69.8kgs in mid-August and I'm now hovering around the 67kg mark fairly constantly.  The less sugar I eat at the weekends the less I put on so I'm now pretty motivated not to eat the stuff just because I can on the weekends.  That's taken what seems like a long time but in the grand scheme of things it's only a few months and it's not as painful as a diet, so I'm sticking with this.  The big 'tell' so to speak is that I didn't put a ton of weight on over Christmas, New Year and Belovéd's birthday, so I'm getting something right. 

I do, however, allow myself 'dessert' pretty much every night after dinner of fruit.  We always have tangerines around at this time of year and I've taken to buying Morribund's Wonky grapes which are just lovely.  They do taste really sweet but there are only so many I can eat, which is really rather the point.  I've been skipping the date bar on some days simply because I forget about them so it seems to balance out overall.

cookie02

Morning_walker said:

Congrats cookie02 that's great! I have had a challenging week, so the sugar-free approach has gone out the window. My new goal is to do sugar-free Saturday as a manageable first step. 

Thank you, Morning_walker!  How did today go for you?  Like Honey_Bear says, if a whole day is tricky, just try one meal or half a way - anything that gets you started in the right direction is a win! 🍀 

Honey_Bear said:

Well done on your successes Cookie.  I was surprised not to have received any notifications because your posts are the ones that always tip me the wink that there's activity on the Thread - I should have checked but I was being lazy.  And there you were, going great guns so well done.

Thank you, Honey_Bear!  Maybe your notifications have been filtered to the Junk folder.  This has happened to me a few times!  

Honey_Bear said:

I was doing really well until late last night, but I've realised that Friday evening is the start of my weekend so I'm just going to go with the flow on that.  In the past I've eaten something sweet on Sundays in particular simply because I'm allowed it, rather than because I really wanted it.  I think I'm going to allow myself Friday nights and balance it by not eating sugary things unless I really want something on Sunday afternoons, and if a date bar would work then I'm going to have one, rather than some of Belovéd's biscuits.

This sounds like a good plan, Honey_Bear.  I've also given up trying to avoid sugar on Friday evenings.  To balance this out, I'm limiting my sugar to just one meal or snack on Sundays as I've found that it helps me to get back into the sugar-free Mondays.  Congratulations on your weightloss!  That is amazing 🤩.  Honey_Bear said:

Who was it who posed the question about when did treats become a daily thing?  Someone cleverer than me, much earlier on in the Thread.  That question has been ringing round my mind pretty much ever since, because thinking back to my childhood we didn't have chocolate every day, and chocolate biscuits weren't a daily thing either.  The problem is, they have been for me for a few years, although I was off sugar for a few years before that so that's what I want - to get back to sugar being a rare treat.  I'm not there yet but I am getting there.  

In_Need saw an ad that asked when a treat stopped being an actual treat and became a regular occurrence.  You are both right that this is really the heart of the problem.  We are too quick to reach for all those sugary goodies but it takes time to unwind decades of bad habits!

By the way, I tried out the flapjacks yesterday.  Thank you JackieBlack for the idea and Morning_walker for the Nigella recipe.  I borrowed from that plus various online recipes (including the Y0uTub3 video Honey_Bear shared earlier in this challenge).  The whole family liked the flapjacks but the recipe needs tweaking as the texture wasn't as good as I'd hoped it would be.  Still, it was tasty -and I willingly ate oats- so it's a good start!  

Yesterday, I had cake in the evening and I also tasted a flapjack (but it only had maple and dates, no refined sugar).  Today, I had the flapjack and I also had a small coconut-based chocolate mousse.  I'm not sure if the coconut ones are healthier than the regular versions but all of us like coconut so I tend to pick them up more often than the regular ones.  

Hope everyone is having a lovely weekend.  

Morning_walker

Hi cookie02, glad the flapjacks worked out well!

I failed at sugar-free Saturday as I bought and ate chocolate I'm currently trying a cocoa percentage limit instead - I can only eat dark chocolate that is 85% and higher cocoa solids. It's a health food at that percentage - or so I have read! I've done well in stopping having the small Llindor chocolate bars in the last few days, which I reckon have a lot more sugar. My long term aim is to cut all sugar except for eating a few squares of high percentage dark chocolate a few days a week. 

This coming week I'll try and have a few dates as a replacement to other forms of sugar - cakes, scones etc. 

Hope everyone is having a good weekend. 

Morning_walker

I've also just checked out the nutrition and ingredients on the Llindt website, and there is palm kernel vegetable fats in the Llindor bar, but not in the 85% bar - and yes, much less sugar of course in the 85% bar... sticking with it for now. 90% is a bit too bitter for me. 

Honey_Bear

Good call, Morning Walker.  I'm glad Lindor don't add palm oil and its variations to the higher percentage stuff, but also pleased that anything about 75% cocoa is too high for me because it means I'll find it less appealing.  It's also a personal thing of mine not to eat anything with palm oil in and has nothing to do with this Challenge, but if we can save a bit of tropical forest as we do this that's all to the  good as far as I'm concerned.  Whatever works for you is absolutely the right thing to do because I don't believe in the one-size-fits-all thing at all. 

The cocoa date bars I eat are packed with sugar but dates are natural sugar and not the pure white and deadly stuff that's added to everything that we don't notice, plus they are very high in fibre and anything that gets my fibre content up is a win for me.  I know exactly what I'm eating with those date bars and on the days I don't have one because I forgot to I know I'm doing really well. I'm now putting them all out of sight so that I don't get reminded of them being around - sometimes just seeing treats is enough to get me scoffing.

Thanks for reminding me it was In Need who put that quote in about treats, Cookie.  Maybe this time I'll remember!  And you're right - the notifications were in my Spam folder so that's sorted.

All this talk of flapjacks is enough to make me want some!  I do really love them, too, just the plain unadulterated oatey ones are lovely but that's probably because the recipe I use has golden syrup (pure sugar), sugar and masses of butter in them - butter and sugar are my heart's desire because in evolutionary terms that's what we're supposed to cram into our bodies when we find them in the wild.  However, I am not a hunter gatherer, I am an urban dweller slug who had to get herself a rescue dog to ensure that I got some exercise.  I can shortchange myself easily and happily but never the animals.  She gets a mile walk from me in the mornings, and a mile in the afternoon from Belovéd.  She's the only dog I've ever known that looks at the lead sometimes and says, 'Do I have to?'!

We went out for lunch yesterday, a small helping of fish and chips in a local pub for the local team playing in the FA cup against Belovéd's team followed by two rugby matches, so he was in the pub for hours, I was there for about two.  I couldn't eat much for the rest of the day but it being Saturday I did allow myself a bar of chocolate and stopped after I'd eaten two thirds of it.  It's not that I didn't want the rest, it was that I didn't need it and I could, for once, stop myself so that's progress.  It's a 52% bar but sugar is the first ingredient on the list.  It's probably an improvement on the minty ones though.

I did, however, nip down to the local Co-0p and bought a box of m@gnums so that there are some in the freezer for next Friday, and a tiramsu for tonight because I absolutely love their version of it and sometimes, just occasionally, a dessert treat is absolutely the way to go.  Belovéd cooks a roast most Sunday evenings and it seems churlish not to contribute something, no?