Rewind to last weekend.
Dave and I have been eating a lot of junk lately, and I haven't been able to work out for the last few weeks. I've noticed a change in my energy because of this and decided that I wanted to try something new as far as a thinking about what is going in my body.
Read: I wanted to change what I was eating but was not in the mood to start counting calories again.
So I went on the almighty powerful Pinterest for ideas and found the No Sugar Challenge. This one caught my eye because I feel like we eat pretty healthy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but I've got a major sweet tooth that gets in the way. I also love all of those processed carbs. Stuff like Goldfish, pretzels, snack pack crackers.
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And Dave, being the all-supportive husband that he is, decided to do it with me.
Whatta-guy.
The version of the No Sugar Challenge I decided to go with was from The Gracious Pantry.
Their version had the most information, made the most sense, and had the most recipes to go along with it.
The biggest rule to follow is to not eat anything with added sugars. Like if you look at the ingredient list, and it mentions sugar or any version of it, you can't have it. This includes corn syrup, cane juice, etc. but also natural sweeteners like honey. If it added anything that functions as a sugar, then you can't eat it. (Here is a list of 50 other names sugar goes by. ) Skinny Ms is also another blog that I've been using as a resources, and hope to get some recipes from this week.
The next rule is that you really shouldn't have more than 3 servings of fruit per day. Fruit doesn't have added sugars, but since they have natural sugars I guess they don't want you going crazy with it.
Also, you need to keep snacking throughout the day. None of this 3 square meals stuff. More like 5-6 small meals. This was easy because I love snacks.
They also make a few suggestions like no alcohol, and suggest to make a yourself a "super smoothie" to get your day started.
Here are the rules as they outline them on their site.
What We Ate This Week
Breakfast:
If you are going to do this challenge make sure you give yourself plenty of time in the morning because you're going to be getting to know your blender.
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| Tuesday's smoothie was strawberry-banana-almond milk-kale |
For breakfast every morning I drank a smoothie and a coffee. (I haven't put sugar in my coffee for years so no problem there!)
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| What my desk looked like every day. |
The first couple of days I used my personal smoothies and made two separate ones for Dave and I. Until he pointed out how much simpler it would be if I used the big one and just made double.
I didn't follow any smoothie recipes exactly, I just threw things in there as I saw fit. I've gone on smoothie kicks before so I was comfortable just playing it by ear.
There was only one day that it didn't quite work out. On Thursday I got to school, took out my smoothie, took a nice long hard look at it and realized that it was not frozen and just separated.
SO GROSS
It goes without saying I didn't have a smoothie for breakfast that morning.
I looked up the problem, and I guess I hadn't balanced out my ingredients enough? There needs to be something frozen, yogurt or almond milk, and a veggie. And I guess that day I didn't have enough of the almond milk and too much non-frozen fruit.
Something to do with a reaction between the foods.
I don't know, I wasn't great at chemistry in high school
So since then I've paid a little more attention to balancing it out and I haven't had my smoothie turn into an alien algea since.
The one tough thing about the smoothies is that any fruits that go in count towards your 3 servings. So if you'd like to eat fruit later on in the day you have to be careful when it goes in your smoothie.
My smoothies always had:
-Unsweetened vanilla almond milk
- Kale
- Frozen Strawberries or Frozen Blueberries.
Other ingredients that I rotated in and out:
-Spinach
-Mango
-Fresh Strawberries
-Fresh Blueberries
-All natural, non-sweetened Peanut Butter
(Dave wasn't crazy about our smoothie with PB but I loved it!)
-Banana
Lunch:
Lunch was hard because both Dave and I are so used to not having to think about it and putting a sandwich together lickity-split in the morning. But with a sandwich you usually have sugars in your bread, sugars in your mayo, and sometime sugars added to your deli meat.
So that wasn't an option.
Usually we actually ended up doing what we had for dinner for a left over lunch. For days we didn't have left overs we had this Spinach Dip with either crackers or veggies. It uses cottage cheese that gets blended together with spinach and a few other yummy (and natural/fresh) ingredients so it's not like the spinach dip you have at parties. It's actually pretty decent for you.
We did find some crackers without any sugars added at the store, but it was really hard. Think saltines, but blander. The crackers were probably the most processed thing I ate all week.
I also had hummus (the one with no sugar added) with celery and carrots for lunch and that did a pretty great job at keeping me full.
Dinner:
Dinner was actually pretty easy. We found recipes we like ahead of time from The Gracious Pantry and were able to make them. Here is their page that lists ideas for every meal.
Sometimes it was just taking a meal we have been eating and making sure we buy the ingredients sugar-less. (Like spaghetti with no sugar, or fresh salsa with no sugar.)
Here is the list of dinners we ate with links if I got the recipe offline:
-Baked chicken, asparagus, and roasted potatos. (This was actually the one meal we ate an added sugar. I didn't realize my Jamaican spice I used on both the potatoes and chicken had sugar. Whoops!)
- Taco Salad (Need to get fresh salsa or make it. Also need to make sure the canned corn and canned beans also do not have added sugar. We had to search.) This was hearty and delicious. Plenty of left overs for lunch.
-Mediterranian Spaghetti (Again, check all of your ingredient lists for those sneaky sugar words on your spaghetti boxes, and anything you get canned.)
-Clean Eating Apple Chicken Salad Another good one for leftovers the next day.
-From scratch Spinach and Mushroom Pizza. We have a dough recipe that we use with no sugar added. The most searching was for a pizza sauce without sugar!
-Grilled chicken with spices, and oven baked potato.
Snacks:
I mentioned above that I love snacks. So I knew we had to stockpile on these. Here are a list of snacks we ate to keep us from being hungry.
-Rice cakes (no sugar added) with peanut butter (no sugar added)
-Cheese sticks
-Veggies and hummus
- Almonds and Cashews (Nothing added to them.)
-Frozen grapes. THESE WERE KEY. My sweet tooth really kicked in after dinner. Is this an actual substitute for ice cream or cookies? No. But was it good enough? YES!
-Whirley Pop Pop-corn with some salt and pepper.
Oh and WATER WATER WATER.
I was drinking water all the time when I was hungry and knew I needed to save my snacks for later or didn't have any sugar free food around.
What I Liked Week One of the No Sugar Challenge
1. I lost 5 pounds.
Well not really.
I did weigh myself Monday and Friday and the difference was 5 pounds. But I think 4 pounds of this has to do with the fact that I've been forcing myself to drink water and not retaining so much of it, as well as with the fact that all of that spinach and kale caused me to be pretty...umm...regular.
So maybe I lost 1 pound. But hey I didn't' go into this expecting to lose any weight!
2. The cravings actually weren't that bad. The fact that you can have fruit helps.
3. It was easier than I thought. I didn't feel the need to "fall off the wagon" that often. Even when Teacher Appreciation Week cake was being pushed in my face or when students were offering me candy at the dance.
What I Need To Work On for Week Two of The No Sugar Challenge
1. Dave and I both feel like we ate too much dairy this week. I am a cheese girl, and since there were no restrictions on that, whenever it came time for cheese (on the pizza, taco salad, spinach dip, cheese sticks) I just went for it because that was my option for flavor or just a snack in general. I want to cut down on cheese this upcoming week as much as possible.
2. I did go over my fruit servings. It's tough keeping track when it's going into smoothies and a part of meals. I just need to do a better job at keeping track.
3. Eating too much in general. I think it was fine this week, but my dinner servings were actually all pretty big. I can probably cut those down.
4. Trying out some new recipes. We tried probably 4 new recipes. I'd like to make sure we try 4 more new recipes this week. I feel like the more we try now, the more we'll find out we like and will stick to when we're not doing the challenge later.
So that's week one of the no-sugar challenge. I'll post again about it at the end of this week.
Now, it's time to wish me luck.
As a teacher, I have a summer job.
That summer job starts up a little early on the weekends before school gets out.
Specifically it starts today.
Today I work a double at my summer job at a Frozen Custard Stand.
Frozen Custard is essentially ice cream, except creamier and just much more delicious overall.
And it's full of sugar.
This my friends, is the ultimate test.
I guess I'll wrap things up since this is the longest post ever.
I want to know if any of you have taken andy "food-challenges". How did it go? Was it easy or hard? If you haven't taken a food challenge, why not?
Have a great rest of your weekend.
Stay Awkward,
Tricia
