Everyone has the place where they draw the line on healthy living.  For me, it’s ditching sweets.  You know how everyone (wrongly) attributes to Benjamin Franklin the quote, “beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy?”  Well, I feel the same way about sugar (and, well, beer too).  Sugar makes so many delightful things that I find it appalling that anyone would voluntarily forsake God’s sweetest creation.  I mean, cakes, cookies, cocktails?  Hello?  Needless to say, this was a true challenge for me.

Breakfast

Normally I eat cereal, which is more out of laziness than anything else.  I’m not a sugar junkie in the morning, but just about every cereal I like has some sugar in it; even my Cascadian Farm Raisin Bran (they do try to make you feel better about it by referring to it as “NATURALLY MILLED ORGANIC SUGAR,” to be fair).  So I got up a couple of minutes earlier and scrambled some egg whites with mixed bell peppers with wheat toast on the side.  This was no real big deal, save for the getting up earlier part.

I also had to remember not to take my multivitamins.  I take chewable multivitamins per my gastroenterologist’s recommendation — I have IBS and there’s a long list of things I need to avoid, including items that naturally contain essential nutrients, and the kind of vitamins you swallow.  And the chewable kind (the kind I like, anyway) have sugar in them.

Lunch

If I wasn’t avoiding sugar, lunch would have been cranberry couscous from Whole Foods and a Vita Brownie for dessert.  The “problem” with the brownie is obvious, but the couscous also had to wait another day because the dressing in it is made with fruit juice.  Not something I would consider a sin (I’m not a fan of fruit juice in general, but its use in recipes I have no issue with), but I was trying to stay true to the challenge.  I ended up sauteing some mixed veggies with a leftover chicken sausage, then baking an apple for dessert (I can go home for lunch when I work in my primary office — yayyyy).  The veggies were fine, as they were not an atypical lunch for me, but the apple is no Vita Brownie.

Dinner

Dinner itself was no issue, but I normally cap it off with something sweet, like a granola bar.  And I like to drink caffeine-free Diet Coke while watching the Red Sox game (on weekdays, anyway — weekends it’s beer all the way).  Not eating dessert after dinner was very tough, I’ll admit.  Luckily I had a banana, so I ate that.  Bananas are my favorite fruit in the universe, and probably in my top five foods overall, so that definitely helped.  Still, I felt like something was missing.  And that something was my Diet Coke.  Some lemon in my water might’ve helped a bit, but I didn’t think of it at the time.  Sigh.

My conclusion?  Yeah, not giving up sugar, sorry.  I like it, and I feel that my food choices are generally above average.  Reasonable changes I can make?  Ditching the sugary cereal at breakfast, for starters.  I’m not a huge fan of cereal anyway.  The Vita Brownie at lunch can be replaced with fruit and eaten after dinner, so I’m only eating one real “dessert” each day instead of two. And I’ve already been working toward avoiding too much processed food — this is a lot easier now that I have a really short commute and can eat lunch at home three days a week.  I think these small changes will make a big impact on my sugar intake, even though I have no intention of eliminating it entirely.

—jerkasaurus

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