Sugar Free September: One Week In

When I first noticed the idea of Sugar Free September on the I Quit Sugar website, I posted a link on social media with a random thought that perhaps I could give it a go. A friend responded that since I'd managed to give up social media for Lent, this should be easy.

That friend probably didn't realise just how much sugar I was eating/drinking on most days. A 500ml bottle of Coke has 10.5 teaspoons of the white stuff in it, and I was drinking two most days - plus chocolate, ice cream and the other usual suspects. In her I Quit Sugar books, Sarah Wilson recommends that you check the labels of foods, and avoid anything with more than 5g of sugar per 100g. That rules out about 90% of what you'll find in the supermarket, including a lot of fruit - grapes are mostly sugar, for example. Bananas are around 50% sugar - and as they get more brown, their sugar content increases.

Although I started this adventure on September 1st, I did begin cooking meals from the books and avoiding sugar a couple of weeks earlier. But September 1st was when I stopped drinking Coke, and really avoiding sugar. There have been a couple of "slips" but generally, there has been little fructose in my diet.

So what have I been eating? Breakfasts have been smoothies with things like plain (full fat) yoghurt, cucumber, celery, coconut water, berries (one cup  per 2-3 portions so not a huge amount) and coconut oil. Lunches have been home made soups or scrambled eggs with ham, mushrooms etc added. For tea, I've mostly had chicken or steak with steamed vegetables - because I'm a bit pants at forward planning.  There are loads of recipes in the I Quit Sugar books, but really it's not so hard to come up with something that doesn't have sugar, once you get your head around it. 

These are some of the clever tricks I've learned from the book:

• Really the only thing I've been using to sweeten anything is rice malt syrup. A few people have mentioned agave nectar, which is a favourite of health food shops everywhere - but agave nectar is 70-90% fructose, and fructose is what I am aiming to avoid with this exercise.
• Cooking for one can prove a problem, but a great way to get around this is to make use of the freezer. Sarah Wilson is a big fan of "par cooked & frozen" veggies - where you steam the vegetables for a couple of minutes, plunge them into cold water to halt the cooking process, and then freeze in portion-sized bags. My freezer is full of broccoli, kale and carrots just waiting to be thrown into whatever I'm cooking.
• If you've made something (anything) a little more runny than you hoped, you can add chia seeds to it and wait a few minutes - they soak up huge amounts of liquid so will make your liquid thicker.
• Replacing sugar with fat means you don't feel hungry, and don't have to miss out on things tasting good. If I have a craving for something sweet after dinner, the advice is to eat some cheese.

Monday and Tuesday were hellish; I knew to expect some withdrawal from sugar, but was expecting a headache. What I actually had was two days where I just felt so mortally tired and drained of energy, it was all I could do to slump in my chair and type out the bare minimum of work. On Monday I actually had a nap. I felt awful. On Thursday, I felt like I had the worst kind of hangover - you know, the kind where your insides are shaking and you're not entirely sure you won't pass out. On Friday though, I woke up feeling a little more alive. I had a headache from Friday to Saturday, but that has gone too now and I feel a lot better.

For me, the worst part is in the evenings; I'm not hungry, but I habitually go out to the kitchen, looking for something to eat. The few times I have "slipped" this week have been in the evenings. And I've noticed the effect immediately. For one thing, the food I ate didn't taste half as good as I expected - much the same way as one craves a McDonalds but when it arrives in the cardboard carton, it doesn't look or taste the way your brain was telling you it would and you kind of resent having been lied to. The experience of eating it is not as heavenly as you imagined it to be, back when there was no chance of you being able to have what you wanted. That sort of thing. I didn't feel too great physically afterwards either. Again - much like a McDonalds.

This last week, I had intended to exercise more, to drink loads of water, to be all fit and healthy. What actually happened was that I felt dog rough, and on some days I barely even took 5000 steps. I did go for a long walk on Monday morning, but regretted it by mid-afternoon when I just wanted to crawl under my duvet and hibernate. After that, there was precious little in the way of exercise.

I've come to the end of my first week, and I find I've lost 3.5lbs without really noticing or trying.

I started this because I knew I was eating too much sugar, and that I needed to do something about it. I did have a thought at the back of my mind that I would probably lose a little weight - but I wasn't expecting it to be this quick or easy!

I would like to add here that I know 3.5lb is a lot, and one is not supposed to lose weight quickly for various reasons. I also know that usually, when I've tried new regimes before, I've lost weight purely because I've eaten less - because I couldn't eat the nice things I wanted to eat, I couldn't figure out what to do so I would skip meals. I've not done that this time around, though. I've eaten loads. When you do something like this, you always get the naysayers who will pick holes in what you're doing. Calorie counting has been such a massive part of our culture for such a long time, entire generations have been born and died believing that calorie counting is how one loses weight. So I expect to get people telling me I should be keeping an eye on my calories, or not eating fat, or eating more fruit, or whatever else. 

The thing that concerns me now, is staying way from the sugar and keeping this momentum. I'm terrible for starting something new, and sticking at it for a week or so before giving up. I honestly don't think I could have even started on this without the Slimpod MP3 I've been listening to every night for the last 12 weeks. Before, the idea of standing in the kitchen preparing batches of soup and vegetables, of making a roast chicken on a week night just for the hell of it, would have seemed bonkers. With just S and I at home, and with S getting her main meal at nursery 4 days a week, I never really saw the point in bothering to cook proper meals and didn't often bother. I will write a proper post about the Slimpod another time.

Meanwhile, off I go to embark upon week 2. My freezer is filled with lovely food, as is my fridge, and hopefully this week I will have some energy to exercise too!

Why I'm Giving Up Sugar

I wrote a post last week about how I intend to take part in Sugar Free September.

I'll be honest; after years of sugar highs (and lows, fixed by eating more sugar), I am a bit nervous as to how I will cope with the withdrawal. I have already begun cutting back my sugar intake and filling my freezer with goodies, so I'm hopeful it won't be too much of a shock to the system.

Here are some things you might not know about sugar:

• In countries where people have free access to sugar, there is a much higher incidence of diabetes. One worrying statistic is that a can of soft drink per day increases your risk of diabetes by 22%.

• Sugar reacts with the proteins in our bodies and changes their structure, forming toxic substances known as advanced glycation end-products. It's no coincidence that those words form the acronym, AGE.

• Back in ye olden days when we all lived in caves, we lived off meat and fats. Our bodies are designed to eat as much of those foods as we need, and then we stop. From time to time we would stumble across sugar - perhaps some berries or suchlike. Since we didn't know when we would come across such a thing again, we would eat and eat and eat, as much as we could. Our bodies don't have that "wait, stop, you're full" signal for sugar because we didn't know when we'd come across some again. This is how come you can easily drink a litre of fruit juice in one go, but you probably couldn't drink a litre of full fat yoghurt in twice the time.

• Sugar is addictive. When you say this, people mostly think you're bonkers - but recent studies have found that not only is it addictive, it interferes with our appetites and confuses our bodies.

• I know the "low fat" diet idea from the 80s is still very popular with a lot of people, who believe if you eat low fat products you'll lose weight.  There's a massive industry built around the idea, and it rakes in millions each year. The problem is that fat doesn't make you fat; sugar makes you fat. And what do manufacturers put into their foods once they've removed the fat, to make them taste reasonable? Sugar. By the bucket load. 

• The sugar in fruit is still sugar. So is the sugar in honey, and so is the sugar in agave nectar, maple syrup and coconut sugar. It's all fructose, which is what causes the problems.

• Our bodies use glucose to perform certain functions - but that glucose is easily found when breaking down proteins and fats in the body. We have no need to put extra glucose into our bodies for general survival and wellbeing.

A lot of people are doing Sugar Free September; it was even on BBC's Inside Out last night. 

Since I started telling people I was doing this, I've had lots of people tell me they would love to do the same, but don't think they could. I'm not going to lie; it is a bit scary. Sugar is everywhere, in everything these days. It's added to everything, even savoury foods, under lots of different names. Our packaged savoury foods are so processed that they are broken down to sugar in our bodies very quickly and can be just as bad as eating sugary foods. I'm finding out very quickly that it's hard to do this if you're going out for lunch or even for a drink. But I'm hoping the results will be worth it!

Throughout September I will be posting  a weekly selfie on my Instagram profile, in the hope that there will be some change in my appearance. I will also update periodically, if I think of anything pertinent to add to this post. If anyone has questions about Sugar Free September, do please feel free to get in touch either here, or on Facebook or Twitter.

Sugar Free September? I Must Be Mad!

My name is Vicky, and I am an addict.

I am addicted to sugar.

When I was about 11, I can remember sneaking into the kitchen to mix margarine and sugar and quickly gobble it down before anyone caught me. On Sunday mornings my mum would go out with my younger brothers and sisters, and I would make chocolate cornflake cake mix for breakfast: sugar, syrup, butter and cocoa melted in a pan, poured over the minimal amount of cornflakes.

For Christmas in 2004, I was given two copies of the same book. I returned one to the shop for a credit and, at New Year when I'd just split up with a boyfriend and felt the need to reinvent myself, I picked up The Sugar Addicts' Diet by Nicki Waterman and read the back cover; it was like she was describing me. I bought it with my voucher, and began reading.

Waterman was a TV fitness expert, always bouncing about in lycra and showing housewives how to burn off those love handles on daytime TV. At the beginning of this book, she tells how even though she was known for being fit and healthy, she suffered with horrible sugar cravings to which she often succumbed. I remember one particular section where she spoke of eating bags of pick n mix. Despite being slim and fit, she had a layer of fat from all the sugar she was eating, and she knew she had to do something. So she'd devised this diet, and kicked the sugar habit, and now she was sharing it in this book.

I was convinced; a lot of what she said about her sugar cravings sounded exactly like me. I would eat crap for breakfast, sugar and crisps throughout the morning, and then more crap for lunch, followed by an afternoon of crap, and an evening of foraging in the kitchen for more crap. I drank loads of Coca Cola, and I was overweight. 

I remember going through the cupboard, and rounding up all the chocolate and sweets I'd been given for Christmas, hiding them in a carrier bag at the back of my wardrobe. Then I went shopping, and began the diet. I remember making porridge for breakfast, much to my housemates' confusion, and eating peanut butter on brown toast before bed each night. After the initial headaches of withdrawal, I started to feel pretty good. The food I was eating was pretty ordinary; I didn't need to hunt down any weird and wonderful ingredients, and I don't recall it being too much of a chore to prepare the meals. But I only lasted a few weeks at it, before I went right back to what I'd been doing before.

Since then, I've periodically given up drinking Coca Cola for Lent, or gone on bonkers healthy eating kicks which have involved cutting out all sorts of everything and only eating the sort of weird, expensive foods you can't even find in the local health food shop. Once I stopped eating all dairy except goats' milk, even though I hated the taste of goats' milk and it repeated on me all day. At one point a couple of years ago, I was going to the gym as many as 9 or 10 times a week but I was still eating an awful lot of junk.

A few months ago, I bought a copy of Sarah Wilson's book, I Quit Sugar. I looked through it and thought:

oh, that sounds like something I should do... but it's a big step. I'll wait until I feel ready to do it.

And of course, the book sat about on the book shelf, and every now and then I would get it out and think, ooh, that recipe looks pretty easy actually... and then do  absolutely nothing about it.

Ten weeks ago, I began the Thinking Slimmer programme. Every night when I go to bed, I listen to a short MP3 of a man talking. I can't even tell you what he says; I usually fall asleep. It has had a weird effect on me - I don't feel like I'm making an effort to lose weight, but without thinking about it I'm exercising more and eating less junk. I've not suddenly dropped 10 stone overnight in some bonkers sensational magazine diet that involves eating only left-handed chickens and organic Mongolian soil; it's coming off very gradually, the same way it went on.

The weirdest part came a couple of weeks ago, though.

I picked up the I Quit Sugar book again, and began actually reading the recipes. Then I did a bit of shopping, and then I just started making some of the dishes. Before, it had always seemed like a bit too much fuss to make these meals; I couldn't be bothered to hunt in the cupboard for this or that, and I didn't want to add something-or-other onto my weekly shopping list.

In the last week or so I have gone from thinking oh, I might make that green smoothie for breakfast to making my own cream cheese, making sugar-free chocolate spread, sprouting my own chickpeas and activating nuts. I've made soups and coconut butter and chicken stock and stuffed my freezer with all sorts of things. And then I went onto the I Quit Sugar website, and signed up for Sugar Free September. 

At the moment, I'm still drinking Coke, and I'm still eating some of the junk I lived off before; but not as much. My meals are a whole lot healthier, and I'm not spending every evening rummaging about in the kitchen for any scrap of hidden chocolate I may have missed the last five times I looked. My plan is to gradually cut down my sugar intake before the 1st of September. That is one of the scariest sentences I have ever written. On the one hand, the idea of giving up sugar terrifies me... but also, it's kind of not such a big deal any more. It feels like it's just sort of time to do it. Watch this space...