I’ve finally managed to reach 28 days sugar-free.  I’ll be honest and say that I wasn’t sure I’d get here, but here I am and I feel very happy about it.  I was expecting cravings to reach epic proportions, but amazingly they’ve been okay.  I keep waiting for that wave to hit, but it hasn’t yet, and every day they don’t appear, it will make it that little bit more easy to resist if they do.

I’ve started to lose weight again after going up and down by about 7 lbs for months and months.  Along side the no sugar lifestyle I’ve reduced my carbs to around 50g per day.  Most of the carbs I do eat come from nuts, dairy and veggies. I wish that I could have bottled how I was feeling before starting this.  I wasn’t ill or in dire straits, but I just wasn’t feeling 100%.  I was getting more headaches, and I’ve never been one to suffer from them very much at all.  My skin was itchy on-and-off, my joints ached a little bit, and often I just felt full and heavy.  As if the food I was eating had been distributed through my body because all of me just felt laden and overburdened somehow.  My sleep was okay but I woke up a lot and often I didn’t feel as though I was getting a really good night’s sleep.  Lately, however, especially in the last week, I’ve been sleeping really well, I feel lighter in general, my skin is a bit better and I don’t have the as much brain fog as I felt I was getting.  I feel like I’m doing my body good, for once in my puff.

To help me along the way I’m tracking everything I eat, as it just keeps me on the straight and narrow.  I use My Fitness Pal, and I paid for the upgrade (towards the end of last year) so I can customise it a bit more to suit what I want to eat.  I don’t actually get obsessive about it, rather I decide what I want to eat for the day, plug it all in and see what it comes out with.  It’s working well because I’m pretty much achieving the macro ratios I want without actually planning it.  Most importantly for me, I eat to hunger.  So if I’m hungry I eat.  I stop when I’m full, and at the moment if I get hungry soon after I eat some more.  If I’m not hungry for a few hours after my last meal/snack, I don’t eat.  It works out to breakfast, lunch, dinner and a snack if I need it.  I’m eating around 1800-2000 calories a day, and macro wise it’s about 11% carbs, protein 19% and fat 70%.  Most of the fat is already in the food I eat (i.e. meat/fish/avocado/nuts etc.) rather than it all being added cream or butter.  So far so good.  I’ll just keep doing what i’m doing and if stops working or I feel crap etc., I’ll make some changes.

One thing I’m not going to do though is reintroduce sugar.  I’m not going back.  It isn’t going to be easy, but after giving it a lot of thought these past 28 days, I’ve realised the most difficult thing isn’t whether a craving will get the better of me, but rather whether other people can really understand why I’m doing this, and be okay with it.  The reason I say that is if I don’t ever eat sugar again, well that makes me a real pain in the ass to have for dinner.  Also it might make me seem really rude, which is the last thing I’d want.  If it’s someone’s birthday (or mine), or a celebration or someone has been kind enough to bake a cake or some biscuits because I’m visiting, and then I say “oh i’m really sorry I don’t eat sugar anymore,” it makes me seem like a faddish arsehole.  Okay, so I would tell someone first that I don’t eat sugar so no need to make me anything with it in, but food is love and kindness, and it’s easy to think “ah she can just have a wee bit.”  I just can’t though.  I know it’ll set me off.  If I only ever had to worry about myself, I would be fine.  But it’s the thought of social situations and dealing with those without appearing like a twat and offending anyone that I’m not looking forward to.  I’ll just need to manage it, but that’s my main worry.

I’ve realised in the past that because I’ve failed sooooo many times when it comes to food, I always couch my plans with the words ‘try’, ‘attempt’, or ‘I hope to…but I might not’ and essentially give myself a get out before I’ve even started.  In fact I may (ha!) have even used some of those words above, I can’t be arsed to read back and check, but it’s a hard habit to break…  As I’ve realised with my financial management plans though, you need to be relentless towards your goal, so I need to apply the same intent to this.  I know I’ll be missing out to a degree, but that’s the price I’m willing to pay, because my health is important to me, and I’m finally in a place to sort it out.  Who knows what might happen – none of us have any guarantees, and we sure as hell are not getting out alive – but for as long as I’m still here I know I want to make the most of it, and being healthy is the key.  So for me, the biggest element of that is saying adios to sugar.  For me, a few missed cakes is a price worth paying.

Have a fabulous weekend people 🙂