Six weeks in and ……

So it has now been 6 weeks since I have begun this sugar free lifestyle.  I haven’t really keep count,  as it just feels like a nature part of life now, it’s  just that someone asked me the other day and I really had no idea so decided to count it up 😉  It has taken a bit of work to be sugar free at times especially in double checking labels of food that we had regularly and replacing them for homemade versions when I found they contained sugar, pre-made tortilla is a perfect example of this. However on the whole, with the cupboards set up with heaps of sugar free foods it has been pretty easy. 

I got through Easter sugar free (though not fructose free as I had some dried currents in our homemade hot cross buns) and a weekend away then last week a few bit of sugar did creep in.  Some as part of meals out (stewed fruit given to us, cream sweeten up and in a salad dressing) and some through choice (curry paste with less than 3gm per 100gm).  I have got to say that while there was a bit of guilt I do try to work on the 80/20 rule in life so figured that as long as the serves were small and I wasn’t making a habit of it, things were all good.  The thing is that I really noticed the difference in my moods on the day after having that wee bit of sugar.  I suddenly felt irritable and a bit volatile along with a mild headache which nagged ever so slightly at me. Thankfully I had a few Bach Flower Remedies to get me through along with a bit of tapping and by the following day I felt good as gold again 😉  Maybe it was coincidence that I had those feelings all in the same week as I had bits of sugar, maybe …….. and then again maybe not.  I certainly felt calmer when no sugar was in my diet that is for sure and it has been a good reminder of why I really began this – to improve my health and well-being (emotionally and physically).

What was left of the second batch minus the crosses as little ones were eager to begin munching.

My journey to giving up sugar has been a gradual one in improving my health, until this final cutting off of all sugar (apart from fresh fruit) that is.  When we decided to have kids I gave up alcohol, luckily for me I was pregnant 2 weeks after that so I had to continue with that sugar loss 😉  From there a realisation that wheat was playing havoc with my stomach made me reduce baked goods. My daughter then developed eczema and while there were no allergies it seemed that the more processed i.e. the more ingredients in it, the more she flared up.  So that meant that I began reading labels more and once you read those labels it isn’t long before you are buying food stuffs without sugar.  I was however still a big fizzy bubbly (soda) drinker, tomato sauce user and a humongous honey hogger!  These were my staples for coping, and feeling normal, until I read an article last December about how fizzy drinks can deplete the calcium in your bones not to mention what it does to your teeth.  Being a runner – well that is what I call the thing I do in the mornings 😉 – I didn’t want to be breaking any bones so the fizzy bubbly was the next to go.

That left my trusty friends honey and tomato sauce (ketchup), along with fresh and dried fruit giving me most of my sugar hits.  It is at this point that I read about Sarah Wilson’s book. ‘What??!! Give up fruit and honey?’ ‘She must be mental’ I thought.  It planted a seed though. A seed that niggled at me and grew till I eventually went to the library to order her book.  It was then that I found and read David Gillespie’s book and the rest is history 😉  No more tomato sauce and no more honey!  I can hardly believe it some days.

I have kept in the fresh fruit for a snacks if needed (dried fruit has been left a bit abandoned on the shelf except of Easter buns)  and use this in baking. It just comes down to preferring to use naturally occurring products versus processed, like dextrose, for me.  I save the dextrose for those occasions, like my Mum’s birthday cake, when the receiver really just wants to taste a yummy sweet baked good and not banana dense wholemeal option 😉 My experiments with the glucose syrup, which I found out is made with completely GM free corn from NZ thanks Queen Fine Foods, have not been that successful so that has be ditched too.  I’m happy to have fresh fruit, mostly oranges, pears and kiwifruit now, as the sweeter in my life (baking  and raw) instead of all the other stuff.  I can go into shops and walk down the lollie (sweets) aisle with ease and even the chocolate section isn’t a big attraction anymore.  I do still have cravings for food however it is just that food, not the sweet sugar stuff that I used to think about.  Usually nuts can quell it pretty fast, thankfully, along with my trusty Bach Flower Remedies 😉

The past 6 weeks have certainly been an interesting journey into what works best for my body and also just how much I don’t miss all those sugar laden foods when I am eating whole, nourishing foods. Here is to continued health, vitality and enjoying life.

Till next week.

Arohanui

Y

www.becominghealthy.co.nz

 

Eliminating emotional eating

Just back from an amazing weekend away in the beautiful Golden Bay region.  It was the first time I have been away overnight without themselves for a few years so it really was great, add to that 6 other fantastic women and learning a craft and I was on cloud nine. 

Before heading away for the long weekend I had decided not to be too strict with myself over sugar, mainly because much of the food was catered and because I really didn’t know how I would be with treats around and others eating them.  I had planned ahead a little though and made sure that I purchased sugar free snacks to share – corn chips, nuts and houmous – along with having breakfast goodies and also a few staples.  I needn’t of worried though as even when the delicious chocolate dessert came out on the first night I was happy to say ‘no thanks’ and leave it at that!  Morning teas, with baked and multi-sugared offerings, desserts and even chocolate snacks didn’t even draw me closer.  I KNOW!!  I’m as shocked as you!  I remember reading in ‘Sweet Poison’ that when the addiction lifted goodies wouldn’t be an issue however I half laughed when I read it thinking ‘yeah right mate!’  The thing is he was right.  There was no craving there at all, it was just another food on the plate rather than then great temptress it had been some 2 months earlier.

Baskets I made over the weekend.

Now here is the interesting part for me….. while I was away I wasn’t really craving anything – sugary or otherwise.  I ate my 3 meals each day,  only had a snack late afternoon as I was genuinely hungry and tea wasn’t till much later, and had no thoughts of eating more than that.  I guess I was busy weaving and learning new skills in the day and then talking in the evening so maybe that was the reason.  The thing is that as soon as I got home the ‘search for food’ was on.  I wasn’t even hungry yet by walking through the home threshold I had reverted to old patterns of eating between meals and wanting second helpings. The difference, from the 4 days prior, shocked me and reminded me yet again of the power of emotions and emotional eating! In coming home I had come back to the little triggers in life that seeing me reaching for food rather than expressing my emotions in positive ways.

I have known for a while that my overeating is linked to my emotions however after reading David Gillespie’s book I had secretly hoped that maybe, just maybe, eliminating the sugar would eliminate that emotional eating I had hooked myself into.  This weekend, and coming home, as shown me that while changing foods and eating habits are very helpful in getting you on the path of becoming healthy it won’t change much if you are still holding onto those emotional triggers that caused you to grab for the wrong foods in the first place. Sure the food I grab for is much, much healthier now that I’m not addicted to sugar just that in my quest for health and good habits around food it isn’t quite enough.  Clearing the emotional baggage is the only way, yes the only way to eliminate that emotional eating.

Bach Flower Remedies are great for clearing emotional triggers to eating.

Throughout this journey, and before, I have been using Bach Flower Remedies (BFR) and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) to help me when I have wanted to eat rather than expressing or releasing emotions.  I have even created EFT you-tube videos for it and documents about which BFR are good!  So it was a good wake up call to take my own advice and use the tools I know work so well to help me clear all those emotional triggers I locked in so long ago.  It is hard I’ll say that, harder than giving up sugar, as it is a life time of using food as a support system.  My aim is to eating healthfully though and in a way that nourishes my body rather than punishing it so it is important to deal with more than just the food going in.  I need to deal with the why.  Maybe you do to so, I thought I would pop in a few remedies that I have found useful.  Of course everyone is different so if you want to find the remedies which best suit you then check out my quiz to get the right one for you. 

Agrimony – if you find yourself comfort eating to stay happy and to stop thinking about your problems or uncomfortable feelings. It will get rid of your inner restlessness and express emotions easier.

Centaury – to help you say ‘no’ to food you can’t resist or to ‘kind’ friends who offer a piece of cake to go with your coffee! If you don’t like hurting people’s feelings and eat to please others then Centaury will really help you.

Chestnut Bud – if you are a yo-yo dieter. When you don’t learn from the past and keep repeating the same mistakes (like reaching for that chocolate bar!) then this is a remedy for you.

Crab Apple – if you have poor body image and become obsessed with the details of diets.

Gentian – if you are easily set back and become despondent if something goes wrong. Maybe you doubt your ability to eat healthy food or lose weight or you give up if you don’t have a good weight loss straight away.

Holly – if you eat because you are angry, jealous or have deep hurts from the past.

Star of Bethlehem – if your eating is for comfort after a trauma, shock, grief or fright.  This can be something that happened recently or in the past. 

Well there are a few to start you off and if you want to read more then check out my document ‘Creating a Vivacious you’ or complete the quiz. 

Hope this finds you all happy, healthy and full of energy for the week ahead.

Arohanui

Y

www.becominghealthy.co.nz

 

 

Untying the bonds

I always thought we were pretty good with sugar.  I read labels and where-ever possible buy products without sugar on the labelling, I make our bread, we don’t do juices for the kids or fizzy drinks (only fairly recent for me I have to say and of course himself has his homebrew) and I make most stuff at home either omitting sugar, like my pikelets, or reducing the sugar by 1/3 to 1/2 the recipe amounts.    Sure the kids had the odd treat but not everyday or every week so all and all I was feeling not too shabby about the whole sugar thing.

Well I was until I came a across an interview with Sarah Wilson of ‘I quit sugar’ fame in which she was describing how she thought she was good too.   She ate fruit, don’t we all?  She used honey for sweeter, just as we do, and she dried fruit as snacks.  Then the big shocker came as she talked about how this was still sugar and the amounts of sugar they each contained and that she was actually addicted to sugar.  It really must of  hit something somewhere as I kept thinking about it, over and over.  Could I really give up sugar?  Honey maybe but fruit?  Surely I wasn’t addicted! We need fruit and dried fruit is just all that goodness condensed isn’t it?  Somewhere inside I was panicking a little in the knowledge that actually maybe, just maybe, I was a little hooked on sugar too.  Not the white stuff but sugar never the less.

I had read many other times about the addictive nature of sugar and not really thought that much about it due to the fact that I didn’t really use sugar anymore, aside from a wee bit in baking. I had even heard about addiction and how the addicts brain was actually wired to work normally with the toxin and abnormally without it, once again I didn’t make any links.  I had even thought that I needed to reduce my honey intake in a bid to improve health but that is about as far as I got and that maybe that wee bit of baking was actually growing since we begun home-educating. Truth was that I was enjoying my sweet treats too much to want to take the information and action it.  Sarah’s interview stuck with me though and I decided to get her book from the library, still doubting that I would need to give up honey and fruit.  As the library didn’t have in stock I reserved it and began to browse.  Low and behold what should I come across but ‘The sweet poison quit plan’ by David Gillespie.  Hmmmm…. I thought maybe the universe is trying to tell me something?

One of our Monday baking sessions.

I got it out and soon realised that this was the guy that started it all.  Sarah had used his research and advice to quit her sugar habit and it seemed that he was now going to be guiding our family of four through the same process.  The evidence in the book, along with information I already knew about food and me was enough for me to see that I was indeed hooked on the stuff – honey and fruit being my big staples and chocolate or bread being my cravings.  In brief David Gillespie explains how it is the fructose portion of sugar which is the big problem.  Not only is it making us fat, it is also making us addicted and causing major health issues to boot.  Yes we need sugar and yes we actually convert much of our food into sugar however this is glucose.  We need glucose not fructose.  In fact our body doesn’t even know what to do with a whole heap of fructose apart from store it directly as fat and as a lovely aside make us addicted to the ‘high’ it gives us each time we indulge.  The scariest thing is that is it is so so much that is everyday food.

So with that very brief and incomplete background I have decided to quit sugar as I’m not that into being addicted to anything let alone being poisoned by it! If you want the facts then check out David’s book ‘The Sweet Poison Quit plan’ or others of his books.  Needless to say that I will keep you updated how everything goes for me and the family.  So far the kids have only had fruit with fructose in it over the last two days and already I am noticing a difference in their appetite, as in they are eating more real food that I present, and that all that honey I have been feeding them certainly has had them hankering for sweet stuff too much.  Herself jnr and myself have both had a bit of a clearing as far as sinus go yesterday and today – not sure if it is related or a big old coincidence – and she also went on the search for sweet things in the cupboard this afternoon, just as I too was feeling the sugar crave hit.  We managed with some nuts and popcorn instead thankfully. 

It is actually nice knowing that I’m not feeding them up with sugar, or myself for that matter, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how this whole thing pans out. 

Arohanui

Y

www.becominghealthy.co.nz