Sugar Rush

This has certainly been an interesting trial in food. Forcing myself to pay attention to what’s actually in the food I eat was eye opening. With a few metrics this time around, I think there was a positive impact of this trial. That in mind, I want to keep up that progress, which makes a plan going forward more difficult. I have a few approaches in mind and I’ll likely be doing some smaller experiments to see what approach I like best.

Final Thoughts

Taking note of how much food has added sugar is a bit disappointing. I plan to continue avoiding most of these foods. I do want to continue the habit of giving ingredients a brief look to see if there’s anything that seems like it shouldn’t belong, and that goes beyond just sugar.

Restricting what I could use in the kitchen led to a lot of great dishes. Though some frustration was definitely caused by things like soy sauce having high fructose corn syrup added. Seeing sugar added to something that didn’t seem to need it is what frustrated me most. My solution became to make my own homemade version without sugar. Often, my homemade version tasted better than what I remembered the original being.

In the end, avoiding processed foods guarantees that I’ll know exactly what is in the food I eat.

Let’s See Some Results

Something I have not done in some time is to try and crunch some numbers that the trial may have influenced. For the past few weeks, I’ve been taking my weight daily and measuring the circumference around my belly – there’s probably a more professional term for that.

Compared to the start, I am down nearly 10 lbs and dropped about 1.5-2 inches around my stomach. It wasn’t until the third week did I really see a consistent drop. Prior to that, I saw some big fluctuations from day to day.

This sounds good and dandy, but the complicated part is pinning this to the trial itself. I wish I could say I had 28 days to adjust this one aspect of my life, but of course that is not the case. Last month, I started training for a marathon in the middle of January, and I don’t think that impact can be ignored.

In terms of diet though, I didn’t really change much. When it came to macro-nutrients, no particular amounts were established per meal/day/etc. My plan was to continue eating similarly to how I had been before, sans sugar.

I feel comfortable saying that I lost weight due to cutting sugar out of my diet, but I can’t confidently say to what extent.

Future Plans

Going forward, I want to treat sugar similarly to alcohol. A little bit every so often isn’t so bad, a lot rarely won’t kill me, but a lot frequently or even a little constantly leads to a bad place. Treats shouldn’t be part of the everyday, but saved for celebrations and special occasions. Just last night, another team was celebrating a birthday at trivia I attend. Our team was offered some cake, and with my trial rules, I declined. In the future, something like this would probably get a pass.

Other ideas I have for handling sugar are to establish a cheat day and only eat home made sweets. Cheat days are part of many diets for a reason, they help to allow for a single period of exceptions. It can be hard to say no over and over, but allowing oneself to enjoy treats on occasion makes sticking to a stricter diet every other day easier. Treating sugar in this way is just formalizing the occasional element I mentioned before.

Homemade is an element I like the idea of, but don’t know how well I can put it into practice. My thinking is that if I eat only what is homemade, I can control the exact ingredients and understand what I’m eating. As someone who’s managed to screw up sugar cookies – TWICE – I don’t know how easily I can pull this one off.

In Conclusion

This concludes my strict no added sugar diet. There were definitely times when I ate something I didn’t realized had sugar. I think the key is to move on and make the right choice with the new information next time. I saw some improvement in a couple of metrics I was looking at, and even have some plans to hopefully keep that improvement going forward.

Speaking of plans going forward! My next trial will be revisiting one from the past – keeping a daily journal.