no sugar: the aftermath

Since eating that first azuki cream puff on Friday, I have eaten (not including breakfasts):

• dutch marzipan fruit loaf for dinner
• a whole bunch of chocolate
• a very sweet granola bar
• pizza (non-sugary, but it was topped with potato, so very carbohydrate-heavy)
• sweet and sour tofu dumplings*
• cute russian chocolates
• another azuki bean cream puff
• pineapple salsa and tortilla chips
• Cadbury creme egg chocolate
• a heap more plain Cadbury chocolate

Hi, my name's Lucy and I'm a sugar addict. Give me one sugary thing and apparently, I can't stop. Maybe this has been exacerbated by the fact that I'm in deadline-induced, self-destructive procrastination mode, but I'm considering making the no-sugar thing more permanent.

* From an awesome vegan restaurant "where the animals all live to (something I've forgotten)". It had PETA stickers on the door and animal posters all over the walls (although they weren't ones that were likely to be eaten).

no sugar: day 24, the end

I gave up on the no sugar thing today. I wasn't planning to, but I have been wondering what, if anything, I was getting out of it. I guess what I was hoping for would be that I would stop craving sugary junk food when I'm not hungry. Actually, that has been true. I haven't really felt like I've been missing out on anything, or not feeling satisfied with what I've been eating (although, I do have a stockpile of Cadbury chocolate that my housemate brought back from a trip waiting for me). Styleygeek reported that she appreciated the taste of other foods more. I'm not sure I've noticed that, although I have had some amazingly good pears this week. I was thinking I finally got lucky and found some at the perfect ripeness, but maybe they taste sweeter when not compared to refined sugar. Hopefully, I'll remember that eating lots of sugary junk doesn't result in any lasting pleasure and I'll restrict myself to eating just things I'll actually enjoy. In any case, I'm counting this as a reasonable success. We'll see if I immediately eat all my accumulated chocolate and go on a sugar binge now...
Oh, and why did I stop today, instead of continuing for the final week? My advisor brought in pastries for lab meeting and I couldn't think of a good explanation for not eating them... It's pathetic that, yet again, I couldn't just tell the truth, but after thinking about it, I didn't think I had enough of a reason to justify sticking it out to myself, beyond "I said I would". Maybe that should've been enough, but I'm not going to let it bother me. The azuki bean cream puffs were definitely worth it, anyway.

no sugar: day 6

This took some willpower today. First, I had to resist the cookies at seminar (at least they weren't as cute as last week's). Then, I agreed to meet a friend at my favourite chocolate/coffee shop. I had to order tea, which I don't generally like, although the peppermint tea was okay. To top it off, we were there close to closing time, so they kept bringing out all the unsold pastries to give away. I did have a croissant (please don't tell me it probably contained sugar), but it was so hard to resist the chocolate cake and fruit tarts. I know where I'll be going on day 31.

no sugar: day 4

This hasn't been too hard so far, although it was hard to turn down peanut m&ms yesterday. At least the free food on Thursday was cheese, crackers, chips and guacamole, instead of cookies. And pineapple. Fruit doesn't count as sugar, right? I think I will be eating a lot of fruit.
Today I went grocery shopping planning to get some non-sugary snacks*. I thought I was doing well by choosing mini-bagels and wheat crackers, instead of tortilla chips and artificially cheese-flavoured things, but apparently sugar is lurking everywhere. I was going to be super-good and get whole wheat bagels, but they had four times the sugar of the plain ones, and twice the sugar of the cinnamon raisin ones! You'd think that after that, I would have checked the label on the wheat thins, but I didn't notice that they contain 12.9% sugar, until after I'd eaten a few. Yay for high fructose corn syrup, once again... Does this mean I have to start over?



* I'm fairly sure I won't be seeing the same results as Styleygeek in terms of "wanting to eat only when hungry" or "loss of junk food cravings", or even "unexpected weight loss", since I'm happy to substitute salty, high-fat snacks for sweet ones.