Quitting Sugar for Two Weeks
Sugar is delicious, is addictive and it is very convenient to the food industry make it accessible to consumption in many different forms. This recipe of factors creates a perfect scenario to people extrapolate their sugar intake.
My alimentation is surely not one of the best. I am a sugar lover and many times I replace full meals with a chocolate or different pastries. Moreover, I have a family history of diabetes and other hormonal dysfunctions. By acknowledging that, I thought it would be appropriate to test my eating habits.
For the following 2 weeks I will be challenging myself to reduce my sugar consumption.
Despite being a little worried about the side effects from the lack of sugar, it surely will be a healthy experiment and I hope to be able to incorporate this experience into my eating habits afterwards.
My plan, the main rules and some considerations
It would be interesting to cut every gram of sugar or even all processed food, however because my lifestyle and diet are already limited I decided to negotiate with myself by setting the following rules:
- No snacks: goodbye chocolates, brioches, cookies, snacks and everything that sweets the life.
- In case of the sugar is added to the processed food, it should sum up no more than 25g or 5% of the total energy daily intake as recommended by the World Health Organisation.
- Sugar from whole foods will be only allowed if they come together with vitamins, fibres or proteins and should also respect the 25g limit.
Documentation
During the following weeks, I hope to gather some information that will help me to visualize my process of avoiding sugar at the end of this challenge.
- Publishing every couple of days my thoughts, challenges or solutions;
- Photos that eventually will be shared on the publications;
- Compiling a table about the foods I am used to consume versus the alternatives and choices that will be applied. I hope to be able to evaluate the new ingredients and the quantity of sugar I was able to avoid;
- Trying to mark each time I have a thought about eating sugar. Maybe I can identify some patterns and track frequency among my absence of sugar;
- Compare my first sketch abou my home with the last one.
(PS.: probably English writing errors will happen and I also might make some bad jokes and puns. Please sorry in advance.)
Expectations
Certainly there will be more positive consequences than negatives. But as a first impression, the negatives seems to be short period of time while the positives will be shown later and probably last longer.
- Positive: hopefully I will discover new alternatives and develop healthier eating habits; have more energy and stabilise it in a way that does not fall into the vicious cycle of sugar addiction; have my skin healing faster; buy less plastic packaging from the snacks; and also find new opportunities to question about consumption.
- Negative: headaches, mood swings, lack of energy, spending more money and time than usual to support better meals.
#Day 1: More awareness than action
Luckily there were no snacks in home and probably my blood was full of sugar yet. But because I knew tough times are about to come, I prepared myself by googling some general information about the effects of sugar on the human body, the quantity society have been consuming and other people’s experiences. To summarise, added sugar is becoming the main reason of serious diseases and interrupting it can make a human fell very similar effects as those of stopping using drugs. Bellow there are some of the links talking about that:
I quit sugar for 30 days, by Matt Avella
What Does Sugar Do To Your Body? 10 Proven Negative Effects of Sugar, by the health nerd
How sugar affects the brain, by Nicole Avena — TED Education
Healthy diet and sugars intake for adults and children, by World Health Organization
#Day 2 and 3: ops! sorry not yet
I started to avoiding sugar sweet food for an entire day on Saturday, however during this weekend I was with my family at Lugano for the Autumn Festival where I broke the promise for the sake of enjoying the moment with them (or probably my body started to miss sugar and I easily convinced myself).
I ended up trying a local soda “Gazosa” from Ticino region for the first time, and took *small* delicious bites of crepes of nutella, raspberries, coconut, and cinnamon with *sugar*. I won’t say it was great amount because if I could I surely would have eaten much more, but it was enough to enjoy.
#Day 4: What a salty Monday…
Its October 7th which means I am officially at least 24 hours with no sugar intake. All what I can say is that I started missing the brioche that I usually take for breakfast and my lovely chocolate snacks. My friend suggested me to eat Pumpkin Seeds as an alternative snack. They are very salty but I loved it. So every time I feel the need to eat something I will be getting them. For lunch I had pasta and for dinner salad.
#Day 5: Ok, maybe I have some level of addiction.
Today I was hungry the entire day and I my concentration was affected. Every thought about eating came to the idea of simply resolving it with a sweet snack from the vending machine. I also experienced some sadness/low energy in the morning and the pumpkin seed became my best friend. My mood was better after I ate a panino di prosciuto crudo and brie cheese, but I was wondering if this happened because the bread probably had sugar on its recipe.
Next time I will be asking to the baker if there is a significant quantity of sugar. This made me think about how people with diabetes for example deal with eating outside on places that there is no clear nutritional information.
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Thank you for your time, the next no sugary days are coming soon.
