The 'Towards a Sugar-Free Future' Challenge

Honey_Bear

The changing of aims thing is hanging around in the ether here too Morning Walker.  I just want to break the sugar habit, which I can do without much trouble apparently, but what I can't do is break the chocolate cravings and habit.  I've cut down hugely but that's not the same thing as being able to take it or leave it. 

I'm glad you're making progress.  It sounds as though we all are slowly but surely, and that's as good as it's going to get.  We didn't turn into sugar or chocolate junkies overnight so this is a marathon not a sprint. 

Today I am celebrating that one of my Easter eggs won't be tempting me any more at all.  I will admit that is because I wasn't chocolate-free, but it's still Easter week so I'm not going to get into a knicker-twist about it.

cookie02

Honey_Bear said:

It sounds as though your work life getting back to normal is playing havoc with the idea of a sugar-free life Cookie.  Ideally we'd all like to think we have autonomy over our lives but the need to appear to be endlessly accommodating to smooth the path of commerce is exactly the same pressure of going along with majority of people when we're out in a group - if the majority want to eat sugary things it's all very well saying no to dessert but it does carry the whiff of being 'faintly saintly' and frankly that's a bit off-putting for other people sometimes.  

This is really true, Honey_Bear!  In the end, I told my client about the sugar-free challenge and it turned out that they're trying to cut down on sugar too and, since we both wanted to avoid sugar, we skipped dessert.  I will try that again sometime - there might be more of us who are being polite to each other while thinking similar things.  As a result of that chat, my Thursday ended up being sugar-free.  On Friday, I had my normal dessert but I was sugar-free outside of that.  Yesterday, I had chocolate and biscuits but less than in the past (plus it is the weekend so no rules were broken ).  Today, I've been sugar-free so far but I will be enjoying dessert with the family later on.  How has the rest of your week gone?  I hope you are enjoying the remaining Easter and birthday treats!

Morning_walker said:

Hello all, Good to catch up with how the challenge has been going for you. All in all I think I'm doing pretty well. I'm being very inconsistent with what my aims are - I think last time I logged on or the time before I was going to cut all sugar out. This past week I've gone for reducing my chocolate intake. It's definitely much less than before I started doing the challenge, so I'm pleased with that. Like you say, it's about the long-term overall aims - imperfect progress is my aim. I also don't feel such strong cravings for chocolate now, so I'm enjoying that feeling that I'm a bit less reliant on it to change my mood. 

Have a lovely weekend all. 

Great to hear about your progress, Morning_walker!  Well done on reducing your chocolate intake 🏅.  That is a big enough challenge by itself.  I remember cutting out fizzy drinks (probably the biggest source of my sugar consumption) and I really wouldn't have done it, if I'd tried to cut everything at once.  As long as you go with what works for you, and just keep going, you will get there.  

I hope everyone is having a lovely weekend! ☀️  

cookie02

Good morning!  Yesterday, I had dessert: a small chocolate mousse dessert with two chocolate biscuits.  That was it for the whole day so I feel pretty good about it.  This week, I'm aiming to be sugar-free Mon - Thursday and then I'm going to try and be sugar-free until Friday evening.  In terms of snacks, I have dates, pumpkin seeds, mini cheese, lentils and some cashews.  I might spice the pumpkin seeds and toast them later (either with some cayenne or I'll make the 'gingerbread' version with some cinnamon and mixed spice).  

Honey_Bear said:

Today I am celebrating that one of my Easter eggs won't be tempting me any more at all.  I will admit that is because I wasn't chocolate-free, but it's still Easter week so I'm not going to get into a knicker-twist about it.

Enjoy, Honey_Bear!  Easter week and your birthday deserve exceptions and celebrations 🐣.  

I hope everyone had a lovely weekend.  Good luck with your goals for this week! 

cookie02

I'm going out on a limb and declaring today a sugar-free day!  I've got through this far and I'm slightly in shock.  Despite temptation (more leftovers from Easter), the dates and mini cheese kept me going.  I'm determined not to give in now and hope I'll be able to continue with another sugar-free day tomorrow.  Hope everyone is doing well 🍀. 

Honey_Bear

Well done for yesterday Cookie, because I'm sure you made it.  There's are a couple of danger zones for me, mid-afternoon and immediately after dinner, so if you'd got through those I imagine you were fine if you're anything like me.  Well done for having your snacks worked out because I think that makes all the difference.  I'm also really impressed you tackled the sugar subject with your client, and really pleased it had such a great outcome for you both.  The amount of stuff we do because we think it's expected or required of us that we'd rather not do always surprises me, but we all do it.

I'm sorry I haven't been contributing.  It's been a busy few days, mainly gardening, because the sun's been out and we haven't had any rain for about six weeks.  Everything's looking great but it all needs watering and trying to avoid using tapwater means things take longer. 

So, food-wise, the good news is that there is no longer any Easter and birthday temptation in the house, but to get to that stage I had to finish the last four handmade chocolates last night.  Temptation - gone.  Today I made my own version of garlicky mushroom paté which was amazing on toast for lunch and had the added bonus of using up stuff I had lying around that needed finishing - a box of homegrown garlic in home-cooked yellow-stickered mushrooms from the freezer and other stuff in the fridge.  I'm finding the healthy eating thing particularly interesting at the moment, and that's a direct result of thinking about cutting right back on sugar and focussing on diet generally because having cut right down on sugar and chocolate I'm not losing weight and that means I'm either eating too much, or I'm still eating the wrong kind of food.  Probably both.  So, more veggies are the order of the day and less processed or manufactured stuff.  Fortunately Belovéd's happy with this approach!

Other than those three chocolates last night yesterday was sugar-free, and today will be.  The plan is to get through to Saturday mostly without either sugar or chocolate BUT I've got about a quarter of a tub of toffee yoghurt in the fridge and some frozen blackberries defrosting for breakfast tomorrow because they both need finishing up, so it won't be entirely sugar-free but it will mean there are two less containers of food lying around. 

I'm certainly eating a lot less sugar and chocolate overall than I was eight months ago, and that's true even at the weekends so I'm pleased about that even if I'm not brilliant at being sugar-free all the time. 

Lent was hard some days, impossible in the final week, but well worth doing.

cookie02

Honey_Bear said: 

Well done for yesterday Cookie, because I'm sure you made it.  

Thank you, Honey_Bear!  I made it through Monday sugar-free but failed yesterday.  One of our neighbours brought us some chocolate chip scones.  She is always very generous, her baking is amazing and I couldn't resist 😋 .  

Well done for making it through your Lent challenge and for sticking with it - even when you were ill, you didn't go crazy with the chocolate 🏅.  I think it also shows how much this challenges changes everyone from a mindset perspective.  It's good to hear that you've been making the most of the sun!  I have been mostly (home) office-bound but got out to walk a bit yesterday, just to enjoy the lovely weather.  Don't be too frustrated with yourself re: the weightloss - it will happen for you!  

Today, my goal is to be sugar-free all day long.  I have lots of calls and I think that will probably keep me away from temptation. We'll see how it goes!  

Hope everyone has a lovely day ☀️.  

Honey_Bear

cookie02 said:

I think it also shows how much this challenges changes everyone from a mindset perspective.

This.  ^ ^ ^

This is exactly what I'm thrilled about, and why doing this Challenge is so amazingly helpful for me, and I think from your comments you're finding something similar.  I absolutely know I'm eating less chocolate, the hardest of all the habits for me to break but sugar itself - I hardly eat any of it any more.  I just can't take the pure sugar taste in jelly babies and the like because I find it literally sickly sweet, and that's a lifetime's sugar habit being dealt with in just a few months.  My tastes have changed completely already, thank goodness.

Belovéd has just read me an article from one of today's newspapers about k3110gs taking the UK government to court because the current legislation regarding the sugar content in breakfast cereals doesn't take into account the nutritional value of the added milk!  It resonated with me because my mother fed us sug@rpuffs and cocoapops as soon as they were available when we were growing up, so I've gor a lifetime's habit to kick in to touch.  I'm not knocking her, I totally understand why she did it, but it definitely did give me a love of sugar, whereas Belovéd didn't get given that muck and he's much better at controlling his sugar intake. 

I'm not sure if you've got the time or the same nerdy interest as me in this subject, but I'm currently listening this podcast on the Tube of You by a wonderful neuroscientist about sugar.  It's two hours long, so I put it on and do a bit of sudoku on the computer while I listen to a chunk on and off when I'm able to.  He's great, and I absolutely trust his expertise, which helps me to understand why things are the way they are, and not just about sugar.

Either way, what we're doing his making me very conscious of how much I crave chocolate, why I do and how to find ways around managing my intake, to such an extent that after eight months even though I find it difficult it's so, so much easier now than when I started on one sugar-free day a week back in August.  I am struggling with the post-Easter indulgence, in exactly the same way as I did with the post-Christmas period, but my consumption is nowhere near as bad as it was before I started the Challenge. 

No-one talks about cutting down as being an effective way of dealing with over-consumption of anything, apart from the totally wonderful Cutting Down or Giving Up Alcohol thread on this forum and I'm so indebted to all of the contributors of that thread after two years of posting daily on there when I kicked the the booze into touch.  Without it I wouldn't have succeeded.  People who go cold-turkey on sugar have more self-control than I have and I just can't do that, but I can do this.

I too gave in last night, and had a m@gnum because Belovéd suggested it after dinner in the same way that you couldn't resist your neighbour's scone.  I'm always reminded of Oscar Wilde's quote - I can resist anything except temptation.  The thing I keep telling myself is that we're now both so conscious about eating anything with sugar in it - it doesn't reduce the pleasure of the sugar, but it does mean we don't go mad every day and feel sick with guilt about it while we're doing that, and afterwards. 

I'll never go back to what I used to do every day, but at the moment being as self-disciplined as I'd like to be isn't as easy as I want it to be, so I've got to keep going with this Challenge until it becomes second nature.  It took two years with booze, it's been eight months with sugar, so I think we're probably on track to get to where we both want to be.

I'm in awe of you giving up your fizzy drinks which you hardly ever mention as being something you've achieved already.  I know just how addictive they are, too.  As a child we lived in Malaysia for a few years, and after school every day we used to go swimming.  Tea was a plate of chips with tomato sauce, and a can of 7up.  Every day.  Fortunately for me 7up wasn't available in the UK as far as I know when we moved back here, and it certainly wasn't available in the Naafi in Germany when we moved there, so while I'd loved it when I had it, it not being available meant I forgot about it entirely until adulthood. 

By the time I could get hold of it again in the USA when I worked there in the 1980s the taste had changed so much it just tasted of chemicals and not lemon any more so I've never been tempted to go back to a can a day since.  But goodness knows, I did try to develop a taste for it because I'd loved it so much when I was younger - that's how much artificial flavouring has changed over the years by the big food companies.  I'm just one of the lucky ones who couldn't get hold of something I was pretty addicted to, and then couldn't afford it when it did become available when I was in my 20s, and then couldn't stand the taste when it was available and affordable.  I think I'm one of the lucky ones who got out through no credit to myself but I do genuinely understand how addictive that stuff is and therefore admire you for being so self-disciplined.

One scone is nothing in comparison! 

cookie02

I was sugar-free yesterday!  That was a real surprise.  Yesterday turned into one of those rare days where I didn't think of sugar.  I had two dates but I had them because I wanted dates, not because I was trying to avoid sugar.  I track this in my ever-growing spreadsheet so I can see which swaps work and which things I just like for themselves.  Dates and lentils are definitely winners for me.  

Thank you for the link, Honey_Bear - I will definitely watch it.  I really enjoying learning more and trying to apply things to myself.  I also apply these to my family, mostly via 'secret' experiments  (ingredient swaps) although they're much more co-operative now they know that the experiments don't end in them eating 'rabbit food'.  In addition to the nutrition side, I'm definitely interested in psychology of why we eat what we eat.  I think that is where a large part of my on-going sugar addiction stems from!  I'd forgotten about the fizzy drinks but you're right about that challenge, thank you .  Thinking back, it was much harder than this.  The amount of sugar I have in a week is probably less than it was in a day back then.  What a scary thought!  I guess the flip side is that, thanks to our past addictions, we know that it is entirely possible to cut back / give up on fizzy drinks/alcohol so it WILL happen with sugar as well.  We just have to keep chipping away...  

Honey_Bear said:

I too gave in last night, and had a m@gnum because Belovéd suggested it after dinner in the same way that you couldn't resist your neighbour's scone.  I'm always reminded of Oscar Wilde's quote - I can resist anything except temptation.  The thing I keep telling myself is that we're now both so conscious about eating anything with sugar in it - it doesn't reduce the pleasure of the sugar, but it does mean we don't go mad every day and feel sick with guilt about it while we're doing that, and afterwards.  

On that note, today, I was fine until a little while ago when I ate a chocolate mousse without thinking (family dessert!).  The moment I started eating it, I realised what I'd done but I decided to just enjoy the dessert and I'm going to skip tomorrow to make up for it.

How did today go for you?  The long weekend is almost here! 

Morning_walker

Hi cookie and Honey-bear, wishing you a good weekend. I'm back to trying for cutting down on chocolate this week. Going to try to have a couple of squares today and tomorrow, then another couple on Tuesday and see how I get on with that. Have been pretty restrained otherwise last week. Determined to get the chocolate addiction under control! 
Have a lovely weekend. 

Morning_walker

Ps, have decided to give the Forum a break for a while as got various things going on work-wise and health-wise so need to be really minimal with my internet time. I'll aim to check back in in a month or so and see how we're all doing. Take care.