Food Glorious Food

Day three of no sugar. I’m eating a ton. A TON. And this morning I weighed about two pounds less than the lowest end of my normal weight. Weird.

I’ve always been a big fan of food. I got the nickname “Gordo” in college because of it. However, since having kids I’ve lost some of my fervor for the taste of food, other than the sweet stuff. Food has sort of become an inconvenience, constantly having to think about what to cook, etc. I don’t like to cook. And though I have a plethora of strong mothering instincts, I don’t really have an instinct to feed people. I enjoy baking muffins. That’s about it.

So cutting out sugar has been an interesting experiment in taste. I feel like I’m appreciating a much wider range of flavors. Tonight I started crunching on some plain romaine lettuce and was amazed at how sweet it tasted. I made some salmon and wrapped it in some seaweed and it tasted just like sushi. So yummy. And thanks to a friend who also gave up sugar, I have been satisfying any sweet cravings I have with a frozen banana/unsweetened cocoa powder/unsweetened almond milk shake. So so good. I’ve had shakes like that before, but since I was also eating sugar at the time, they always tasted good-but-in-a-health-food-kind-of-way. Now they taste awesomely sweet and chocolatey enough to make up for my lack of daily chocolate chips.

I’ve also been slathering everything in sight with almond butter. Celery, rice cakes, apples – it’s really good on rice cakes. I used to put almond butter and honey on them, but they’re perfectly good without the honey. Same thing with my hot rice cereal. I always put butter and brown sugar on it, but it tastes good with just butter and some ground flax seeds.

I don’t expect to cut out sugar forever. I’m not an extreme person, and I know myself well enough to know that eventually there will be some treat I won’t want to pass up. But I do think I’ll be much more discriminate about the sweets I choose instead of eat every sweet in sight just because they’re there.

It’s really empowering to know that I can do this. I do feel a little deprived, but not as much as I thought I would. I’m actually rather thankful for the thrush because I wouldn’t have had the discipline to try this otherwise, no matter how much I’d want to. And I needed to. The problem with not gaining weight when you eat lots of sweets is that you have one less incentive to not eat lots of sweets. It’s still unhealthy, even if you’re relatively thin.

So I’m rather enjoying this experiment. Physically, I feel good and bad at the same time. I’m sure there’s some withdrawal/detox stuff going on. I’m a bit low energy (which could also be because two of our three moppets woke me up in the middle of the night) and sometimes I feel a little blue. But at the same time, by body feels “cleaner” inside.

My next goal is to up my veggie intake more. I like veggies OK, but they’re not the first thing I go for. I did have a fabulous orange bell pepper today. And grilled onions are God’s gift to the earth.

I feel like I should miss chocolate. But I really don’t. I never would have bet on that in a million years.

I wonder if it misses me. 🙂

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