This is week #3 in my journey to go sugar little and wean from my over consumption of sugars.What I should be ideally craving is this a mango and strawberry spinach salad which has sweet from the fresh fruit. This salad is all healthy goodness.
BUT, what I really am craving is this, a Scharffen Berger mini cake. hmmmmm, yum!
So straight out, I have to say that weaning from sugar is proving to be MUCH harder than when I weaned myself completely off Diet Coke which took 2 years. Diet Coke was like crack to me, that's how addicted I was, and thankfully today, if I take one sip of the DC I get instantly illin'.
I'm not even trying to wean myself completely off of sugar. I'm just trying to get down from eating 80g of sugar/day where I was before I started this journey, down to the American Heart Association's recommendation of 25g of sugar/day. The more I think about or I should say experience the cutting back of the sugars, I can say that thing I have noticed the most is my emotional attachment to sugar which I started talking about last week.
We have no emo attachment to Diet Coke but cake = love
I think this sugar wean is much harder than the Diet Coke wean because Diet Coke was never a food that gave me any kind of emotional comfort, I just liked the sweet fizzy-ness. I gave up the Diet Coke because I wanted to eliminate artificial sweeteners from my daily eating. I found fizzy alternatives in things like carbonated water and low cal drinks like Izze-Esque.
As I mentioned, Grandma Rose passed away last Sunday, and I flew back to California on Thursday. Her memorial was on Friday night, and the funeral was on Saturday. Besides seeing my folks and immediate family, I got to see plenty of my aunts, uncles, cousins, and their children (the great-grandchildren).
Being in California is stressful for me because seriously, the longer I've been away, the more I'm convinced that there is just some weird intense energy in the Bay Area that just does not jive with me. I love my family and friends here in CA, but I really do miss being in Phoenix right now. I don't go back for awhile longer because my mom, aunt, and sis-in-law have birthdays coming up so I figured I'd stay a week longer. Plus, I'm hanging with one of my BFFs @dianev and it's fabulous to be with my friend for a few days...not to mention is she is an awesome cook.
So, we go kaput
With the stress of everything, over the weekend, the whole sugar weaning thing completely went kaput, I'll just be straight honest. One of my aunts who lives in Rome Italy brought some Italian chocolates with her and it was game over. I ate the foreign delights with such fervor hoping maybe it would help curb the angst I was feeling over the weekend....which it did. Chocolate = comfort.
Besides grandma passing and being in California, I was feeling angsty about being one of the few left of the cousins who are not married, have kids, or even at least a significant other. What makes it tougher is that I'm also the 3rd oldest of the 40 grand-children, and now the oldest who is without kids, husband, or SO.When I'm away from the family it doesn't get to me, but when you're in situation where it feels like you're stuck on Noah's Ark, well it gets to you.
There were several times, I really started feeling like the spinster aunt, and what I did notice is that when those feelings flared up, I also started intensely craving a cookie, some cake, and at one point, I couldn't find anything sugary except a can of regular Coca-Cola and I drank half the can. Oh yeah! I haven't had regular Coke in years, and I drank some during my sugar Emo fit and scarily it did help calm me down....At that moment, I really saw how strong my emotional ties were to sugar.
Instead of judging myself and starting with the negative self talk which only makes me feel worse, I took a more productive road and said to myself, "Look, mess happens, and you're under enormous stress right now. So, you had a bad day. It's alright, tomorrow is a new day...and besides back at the hotel you could have raided the vending machine and you didn't so that's a positive :)"
We focus on the positive and what we did right even if it was something small because it's better than zero. And remember as I mentioned yesterday in Do you over-think?...we can always course correct along the journey.
So, how has your sugar weaning been going?
