Time for a treat

Time for a treat

I like baking but I hardly ever do it. Baking leads to baked products. And baked products lead to me eating baked products. I can’t afford to have biscuits, muffins and cakes hanging around the house, tempting me with their sweet goodness, willing me to snack on them at all hours. In the past I have been thinking about the fat, worried that all the butter in that chocolate cake was literally going straight to my thighs. But now, of course, I’m more interested in the sugar. Table, caster, brown, icing- it’s all the same when it comes from cane sugar, and all have fructose- about 50%. This, as I’m discovering, may not only be bad for me in many ways, but may also be addictive. Perhaps it’s not greed that brings me back for another cupcake, perhaps the fructose in them really is calling my name.

Anyway, with my fructose free status, if I want a sweet treat, I’ll have to do it ‘off the grid’ style, using something other than normal sugar as a sweetener. Dextrose (glucose) is available from the home brewing section of your local supermarket or store (I got mine from Big W). It looks like sugar and tastes (almost) like sugar, but has no fructose. Hurrah, dust off the muffin pans!

It’s not complicated to replace dextrose for sugar in baking- it seems to be just a straight 1:1 swap. A fellow fructose-free blogger mentions that things baked with dextrose seem to brown and potentially burn more easily. There is a technical, molecular reason for this, but the best explanation I could find (here, if you're interested) makes no sense to me- it basically says that things brown and burn more easily, which I already knew...The remedy is simple- keep an eye on it in the oven and reduce the heat or the baking time if needed.

I felt like trying coconut bread. I am not exactly craving sweet things (although the walk down the confectionary aisle at Coles is still a bit shaky and best avoided) but this is an old favourite which I haven’t had for years because, well, I was worried I would eat it all. It's not overly sweet even when made with sugar, but is hugely delicious.

I’m glad I chose this recipe which is the world’s EASIEST cake, great for a dextrose beginner and rusty baker like myself.

Fructose Free Coconut Bread

1 cup SR flour

1 cup desiccated coconut

½ cup dextrose

1 cup milk

Mix all ingredients together- nothing fancy, a wooden spoon will do. Pour into a greased loaf tin. Bake for about 30 mins at 170C (fan forced).

Here’s the result- hmm that browning thing was right, but it’s not too bad and didn’t affect the taste.

Serve slices warm with a bit of butter. Yummmm.

I made this on the weekend and it was lovely- I had a few slices :) But the thing is that I haven’t been back for more. It’s like the little part of me that went ‘hmm, treats in the kitchen, I’d better eat them’ has been turned off, or at least muffled. I’m liking the idea of treats being real treats and not an unbearable temptation. The great thing about this cake is that you can freeze it and then when you want a treat again, just heat a slice quickly in the microwave and it will be warm and delicious again. Thanks mum for remembering the recipe :)

Keep on moving

Nature (plus or minus nurture) has not made me an exercise junkie. I don’t belong to a gym (paying all that money seems pointless since I don’t go), and most of my exercise at the moment comes from bursts of walking, pushing my son in his pram. (In case you think this is a wimpy form of exercise, I should add that my son weighs more than 10kg- it’s no picnic to push him up a hill). But I should add that this is not an everyday thing. Sure I push the pram around when we do errands, but what I consider real ‘exercise’ (specifically walking for say 40 minutes to an hour as aerobic exercise) is not my idea of fun. I easily avoid it. After all, I’m a busy full-time mum. Who has time to exercise?

Since I’m going to the extent of quitting sugar in the quest to lose weight, I may as well be thorough about this and work out the exercise question. I need to know whether I have to say, join a gym (and actually go), or make sure I’m out pounding the pavement pushing the pram every day, or something else in order to lose weight.

Well to start with, research has pretty consistently shown little or no effect of exercise alone on weight. That’s exercise like going to the gym, jogging, power-walking, cycling, or playing sports. These reviews (here and here) showed that on average, people who exercised didn’t lose weight when compared to those who did nothing. Plus, those who dieted AND exercised only lost (on average) a tiny amount more than those who just modified their diet. This seems a bit unfair. Surely exercise, as horrid as it is, should be rewarded? Why doesn't it work?

Turns out we burn very little energy through exercise. 40 minutes of moderate intensity aerobic exercise might feel like hard work (unless it is Zumba, then it will feel like a party!), but after all that sweating you have only burned the equivalent of one piece of chocolate cake, or 3 scoops of vanilla icecream, or a single piece of apple pie. Damn. And then there is the possibility that you will want to eat that pie more, because you went to the gym. Studies like this one show that some people compensate for the energy they lose by eating more. Oops.  These researchers showed that adolescents who increased their physical exercise also increased their energy intake by 100 calories more than they burned in the exercise (on average). And the more intense the exercise, the greater the compensation may be, according to this research. 

There is also research to show that when we do intensive exercise we may reduce our movement throughout the rest of the day to compensate. These UK researchers compared the overall physical movement of kids from a private school who had nearly 2 hours of PE per day to kids at schools with PE for about 2 hours per week. The children wore ActiGraphs which measured the amount and intensity of their movement. Guess what- the children in all three schools moved about the same amount and at about the same intensity. The organised PE did nothing to increase overall activity of the kids because those children simply moved less at other times. I knew there was a good reason that I didn’t like PE.

It seems exercise is not for everyone, because, to quote these guys, ‘some individuals do not experience the beneficial effects of exercise on body weight’. Some of us compensate (unconsciously, by the way), and this negates all the benefits in terms of energy loss. Well, well. Yep, that’s me. 

Of course our great-grandparents didn’t go to Curves. They may have pushed babies in prams but they didn’t do it for ‘exercise’. They did it as part of everyday movement. They moved more than we did and perhaps this simple ‘moving more’ is the answer to managing weight without accidentally tripping the switch that tells our bodies to compensate with more food or more rest. This great article in Time Magazine summarises some of the latest thinking in relation to exercise and weight loss and points out that many of the benefits from exercise like improved cognitive abilities and overall health are shown based on low-level, everyday movement (like hanging out the laundry, taking the stairs instead of the lift and carrying the groceries to the car) and not on vigorous or even moderately vigorous exercise.

So...it seems it is ok to say that going to the gym or even pushing myself to power walk with the pram for ‘exercise’ will not help me lose weight. Hurray! It’s really a freeing thought. I may one day find a sport or physical activity that I love, and if I do it for fun, health and maybe fitness, then I'll be fine. I probably shouldn't do it for weight loss though.  

For now, I think I need to concentrate on moving more in my daily life. This will (hopefully) help my body burn energy without triggering the need for compensation. It will also be healthier than couch-potato-ness. So, I’m going to try to increase the amount that I move around and to build this into daily life. Rather than trying to convince myself to exercise, rather than planning (and then avoiding) exercise, I’m just going to move. 

I'll keep you updated on how this goes!

Cleaning house

I spent this morning cleaning out our ‘snack shelf’. I needed to do this anyway- the shelf is too high for me to reach to the back and there are things in there of which I know not- the ghost of snack attacks past. I found some candy canes from Christmas two years ago. They were probably still good (do candy canes go off?) but I chucked them out anyway, along with

•         Two packs of ‘Double-D’ candies. Completely disgusting anyway, but also made with Isomalt, a low calorie sweetener which acts body just like sugar with approximately 50% glucose and 50% fructose.

•         Two packs of 'Sultry Sally' 97% fat free potato chips (salt and vinegar). Most flavoured chips have sugar in the flavouring so I was surprised and a little excited to see that these used dextrose (glucose). Then I realised that they a) contain MSG for no good reason and b) taste like cardboard. So, I chucked them.

•         Three individual snack packs of apricots in juice by Weight Watchers. No sugar added and only half a WW Point each (I think under the new ‘Pro Points’ system they are worth 0 points). But, sweetened with cyclamate and saccharin, artificial sweeteners which don’t act like fructose in the body (as far as we know) but which I can probably do without anyway. 

Goodbye ‘diet’ snacks. You won’t be missed. My snacks now (in case you are wondering) are things like popcorn, plain potato chips, nuts, rice crackers etc- as well as fruit, cheese, etc. Yummier and healthier snacks than the manufactured crap I used to eat in the name of my diet. I haven’t felt the need to snack as much as usual, anyway, which is great news.

I’ve also had a good look the snacks I give my son, who is 12 months old. I must admit that my attention previously was on the salt, rather than the sugar. Babies' kidneys can’t cope with salt in the same way that adults do, and it is dangerous for them to have large amounts. The Food Standard Agency, UK says that toddlers 1-3 years can cope with 2 grams of salt per day (0.8 grams of sodium) max.

So that's salt, but I'm off the sugar grid, remember? So, of course I'm now interested in sugar for toddlers. It's hard to find recommendations about the daily intake of sugar for this age group. The 'Toddler Healthy Food Pyramid' on Kidspot doesn't even mention sugars. And the information on the Raising Children Network site is also sparse in this respect. Perhaps we are all pretending that the only sugars littlies will come across are the natural ones in fruit and vegetables, and the lactose in milk and dairy? Please. If you expect toddlers to have no foods with added sugar, then say NO FOODS WITH ADDED SUGAR. 

Well anyway, what’s in our cupboard? My son is still at the age where he eats plain rice cakes enthusiastically, and I haven't ventured far into commercial snack packs or bars so far. The ones I had bought, though, included a few hidden nasties from a sugar perspective. Rafferty’s Garden Fruit Snack Bars (recommended for 12 months plus), a former favourite, turned out to be 40% sugar. Some of this is the (dried and concentrated) apple paste, but if you look at the ridiculously long list of ingredients that these bars contain, sugar is listed twice (added to the ‘fruit paste’ and to the biscuity outer layer of the bar). At 6.5 grams of sugar per serve, baby gets about 1.5 teaspoons of sugar in a tiny bar. Yum! 

Sultanas are another suspect food in terms of sugar, unfortunately. When someone opened a container of sultanas at mothers group this week, the babies all channeled their inner locust, swarming over and devouring as many as they could. I don't think I've met a baby of this age who doesn't love their 'tanas. Sultanas are 100% fruit, of course, but with all the water removed they are 80% sugar instead of the 20% sugar of the grape that made them. The usual story with fruit is that the fibre content, as well as the overall bulk (mostly water) of fruit limits the damage from the fructose that they contain. It fills you up, naturally limiting the amount of fructose you can eat in one sitting. You might eat a medium orange (about 7 grams of fructose), you might even find room for two (14 g fructose), but you probably wouldn't want your dinner afterwards. Compare how easily you (or your one year old) can eat a 40g packet of sultanas (about 13g fructose) and still find room for more. 

I'm not binning the 'tanas, in case you were wondering. We're just having them as an occasional treat instead of an everyday snack. The Rafferty's bars are gone though. Now we need some new ideas before the rice cakes get old- I'm always happy to hear new ideas for toddler snacks, so please feel free to post your suggestions below. [Thanks to those who pointed out that the comments weren't working for everyone- I had it on the wrong settings. I've fixed this now, so it should be easy to comment if you want to]. 

All in all, a good day's work. I know I'm not going to be able to keep my baby off the sugar grid at all times, but at least now I’ve made sure the snackables for both of us are as healthy as possible :)

Fat versus fiction

I hope my research-y posts aren’t boring anyone that reads this. I’m finding it really fascinating to look into some of these things for myself- I think it’s the first time I’ve thought about nutrition in detail, even though I’ve thought about food, a lot. Feel free to post comments if you have any. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

I posted last about sugar and weight gain, but I can’t ignore the fat we eat when thinking about weight. I have always thought fat had more to do with weight problems than sugar. So, I use low fat milk, eat low fat cheese, ignore the crispy skin on my roast chicken and the delicious crackling on my roast pork. I limit gravy, fatty sauces, and fried foods. I choose the low fat tomato-y pasta sauce when we eat out, instead of the creamy sauce- I don’t think I’ve ever ordered the carbonara. I usually avoid things like potato chips for snacks, choosing lollies instead. Of course I sometimes eat high fat things (delicious camembert cheese springs to mind), but not without feeling guilty. But despite living this low fat lifestyle (with a few slip ups), I’m overweight. Boo. What to do about it? (Ignoring the obvious exercise question for the moment). Should I reduce the fat in my diet even more?

Doctors, nutritionists and the government have told us for many years that fat maketh the man (and woman) fat. We have been encouraged to keep our fat intake low, and as a result of this have increased our carbohydrate intake. After all, we need to get energy from somewhere, so we should ‘eat more breads and cereals’ as Norm learned in the Life Be In It ads of the 1980s (which you can revisit here if you like, thank you YouTube!) In case you think things have changed, here is Nutrition Australia’s current healthy food pyramid. Fats are in the top teeny part, and we are supposed to use even ‘low fat’ spreads sparingly. Although sugars share the top tiny portion (ie, we are supposed to keep our intake low), a study in 1994 showed that Australians who had the lowest fat diets had the highest intake of refined and natural sugars, not to mention alcohol. Oops. This won't surprise any of you who have already realised that most (if not all) foods manufactured to be ‘low fat’ have more sugar than their full-fat brothers. The sugar is added to make us think they taste nice, isn’t that great? As sugar has about half the calories per gram than fat, they can take out say 1 gram of fat and replace it with up to 2 grams of sugar without affecting the calorie content. So, a low fat meal is often a high sugar meal. Sneaky bastards.

As a former fat-a-phobe (phobic of fatty food, that is) I’ve come to realise that unlike sugar, fat is not an ‘empty’ source of calories. Fat is necessary for the body because:
• It provides essential fatty acids
• It helps us to absorb vitamins such as A, E and K which are fat-soluble
• Our nerve fibres are insulated by fat, and fat helps to transmit nerve messages
• Our cells all include some fat, which helps to transport nutrients from cell to cell
• It helps our bodies to recognise when we have had enough to eat.

This isn’t all that fat does either. Fat is essential. Given the list above, a low fat diet starts to look a bit, well, stupid. Or, if that’s too harsh, then at least short-sighted, since we decrease one of the things that helps us to feel full and stop eating. On the other hand, there is evidence (for example, this study) showing that the fructose in sugar actually decreases our body’s ability to recognise when we are full by interfering with a hormone called leptin. So, fat says stop, but sugar says 'more'. I’ll look into that one in more detail later.

What about ‘bad’ fats- ie, saturated fats- surely I should at least be avoiding those? The Australian Heart Foundation suggest on their website that Australian’s decrease their intake of saturated fats because they lead to an increased risk of heart attacks and stroke. This has been the mantra of nutrition experts since about the 1960s, but is directly contradicted by a review published in the world’s top nutrition journal in January of last year which showed  that “there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD [coronary heart disease, which can lead to heart attacks] or CVD [cardiovascular disease which can lead to strokes]”. This finding came from a meta analysis of research, which is a combination of the studies in an area so that instead of say 10 smallish studies with say 10 participants each you combine the data to get the results for all 100 participants. This meta analysis included 21 studies spanning 29 years and had 347,747 participants. One of the co-authors,when interviewed by the Boston Globe put it this way: 'There is no evidence that cheese causes heart disease'. Hurrah!

So, I have started to make my peace with fat. It's been trying to do me some good, and I've been willfully misunderstanding it and trying to avoid it all this time. I’m having full-fat milk again, I think for the first time in my adult life, and I am loving it. It’s delicious! (Just as an aside, back in the day I remember this being called full cream milk- is it just me, or have we started to give it a much more negative sounding name- full fat??). I’ve completely stopped looking at the fat content of food before eating it. I feel like a rebel just saying that.

David Gillespie’s experience and that of others who have quit sugar using Sweet Poison has been that they get full easier and they stay full longer. They report that they feel the ‘fullness’ in a much more potent way than before. This might be something to do with letting fat do it’s job of letting us know when we’ve had enough, unhampered by sugar sneakily turning off the ‘I’m full’ button and triggering the ‘more please’ switch.

Well, I’m not there yet, so I’m off to eat some cheese, but it will definitely be minus the guilt :)

Mostly harmless?

I know my last post was long, sorry. I’m new to blogging :)

Ok, so sugar is addictive. Check. Is it bad though? Since I was initially impressed with the idea of going sugar free because I need to lose some weight, I want to look at whether sugar can be implicated in being overweight. This would definitely tip the scales (ha ha) toward sugar being bad, in my opinion.

Here’s what I used to think about how sugar affected my weight. To gain weight, you just need to eat more calories than you use (and to lose weight, you do the opposite, obviously). Sugar provides energy (adds calories), and because they are ‘empty’ calories (sugar doesn’t provide any other micronutrients that the body needs), by eating those jelly babies I am using up my precious daily allowance of calories on something that doesn’t have any nutritional value. Such was my understanding, and I don’t think it is necessarily wrong, it’s just incomplete.

Sugar is 50% fructose, 50% glucose. These two parts aren’t processed in the same way by the body, and they don’t result in the same outcomes in terms of our weight. Research has shown that if you increase people's calorie intake with fructose, you get visceral adiposity- that’s a big tummy- which is a strong and well-validated indicator of risk for chronic diseases including cancers, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes. This is why the Australian Government are trying to get you to Measure Up. (Just out of curiosity, I checked what the Measure Up site suggested I do about reducing abdominal fat- they suggest eating less. Thanks). You don’t get this dangerous fat when you increase the calorie intake with glucose instead of fructose. It’s not just about the calories.

Fructose is processed by the liver. The liver sends fat to the tum and triglycerides (fat again) into the blood (triglycerides are implicated in coronary artery disease- hurray, more to worry about!).  Let’s see what this does to rats. An Editorial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition summarises years of research nicely: 

experimental studies in animals have shown that fructose can induce most features of the metabolic syndrome, including insulin resistance, elevated triglycerides, abdominal obesity, elevated blood pressure, inflammation, oxidative stress, endothelial dysfunction, microvascular disease, hyperuricemia, glomerular hypertension and renal injury, and fatty liver. These effects are not seen in animals pair-fed glucose or starch, which suggests that the mechanism is not mediated by excessive caloric intake.

Ouch. So, fructose makes rats not just fat, but really, really unhealthy. And this is not because it ‘adds’ calories. Yes, those calories (if not used) will be stored as fat whether the rat eats glucose, starch or fructose, but you don’t see the cascading, overwhelmingly bad outcomes, some of which directly impact on weight, for glucose or starch.

There is a growing body (ha ha) of research to suggest that fructose leads to these outcomes in humans as well as rats, including the study I mention above. It is messy, though. Some researchers flat out deny that there is evidence for a link between fructose and the types of symptoms (including weight gain) that are evident in rats. Others say things like “there is compelling evidence that very high fructose intake can have deleterious metabolic effects in humans as in rodents”  (emphasis added). Finally, there are people like Dr Robert Lustig who used to work for the American Heart Foundation (including co-authoring their sugar guidelines) and who now unequivocally believes that sugar is the main culprit behind overweight and other problems. This is a good summary of what he thinks.

They can’t all be right. We obviously have more to learn. David Gillespie (in the Sweet Poison Quit Plan) says that there are over 3000 studies which confirm that sugar makes you fat (I haven’t counted them myself but I’ll take his word). Some of these are on rats or other non-human subjects, but there are many on humans as well.

This isn’t the end of the story about sugar and weight by any means, but I’ll leave it here for now. I’ll put my hand up and say that I believe that sugar is more- maybe way more- than an empty calorie. I don’t pretend to know exactly what it does, but 8 days in, I feel fantastic and very positive about having cut it out of my life. I've lost over a kilo already. 

So, if sugar is an empty calorie, then my body won’t miss it: I never needed the Party Mix (I just thought I did). And, if it’s more sinister than that, then I’m much better off without it.

Of mice and men

Well I’ve started week 2 of quitting sugar (as of today). So, I thought I’d better try and understand more about why I am ‘quitting sugar’ and not simply ‘cutting back on the old Allens Party Mix’. You quit something that you are addicted to, so by talking about quitting, I’m suggesting (I’m not the first) that sugar is addictive. I think the language we (or I?) use to talk about sugar is interesting. A sugar fix. Sugar cravings. Sweet relief. Ok that last one is not talking about sugar, but I’m sure it can apply. Here’s what I have come to realise about sugar cravings: They are real.

Simply, eating sugar creates a chemical response in the brain which is similar to a fix from an addictive drug. In fact, in a review of research (including their own) into sugar, fat and the possibility of food addiction, Drs Avena, Rada, and Hoebel revealed that sugar bingeing leads rats to show “behaviors and neurochemical changes that are characteristic of drug abuse” (p. 626). Drug abuse, yes. I feel sick. Without going into too much detail about receptors, dopamine and other stuff which, tell the truth, I don’t fully understand myself, the Drs Three suggest that the observed brain chemistry when sugar is withdrawn is scarily similar to the brain chemistry of withdrawal from morphine, nicotine, and alcohol.  (They don’t say scarily, I added that).

Their paper goes on to describe the behaviours observed in laboratory rats when they were first given sugar ‘fixes’ and then had their food taken away for 24 hours. These behaviours included: teeth chattering, hand (well, paw) tremor, and signs of anxiety. Well, you might argue that this was just because they were hungry - they hadn’t eaten for 24 hours, remember. I’d be a bit shaky too. The interesting thing is if you let a rat binge on fat instead of sugar, and then withdraw food for 24 hours, it does not show these behaviours. Sugar is addictive. Fat is not. At least to rats.

You may be surprised by how much of the evidence about food’s effects on the body generally comes from animal models, rather than human experiments. No, not from slim, tall rats who look good in clothes, but from animals used in laboratory experiments as ‘models’ of what would happen in humans. This happens a lot, particularly when the research is too new or dangerous to try on humans, and/or where humans are too complicated or too prone to do their own thing, to really get a clean result. For example, if you wanted to do the above experiment (feeding sugar vs feeding fat and then withdrawing it and observing the effects) on humans, you would have to get ethical permission (this may be difficult, given that you’d have to argue that fat/ sugar bingeing wasn’t going to harm the participants), and then ensure that the participants actually ate the food, and only that food, so that you were sure that the effect (e.g., the withdrawal) was due to that food, and not to something else they ate.  You would probably also want to monitor their environment and things that they did, in case these things affected the results. Complicated, no?

You could try to answer the same question in another way: perhaps with two groups of people, one group who already have a high fat diet, another group who already have a high sugar diet. But you couldn’t discount the effect of the other foods they eat, their health and food history, their environment, and whether or not there were differences (e.g., psychological) between the groups- maybe more of those who chose to eat a lot of sugar already have more ‘addictive personalities’ and therefore are likely to show more signs of withdrawal . It’s just easier with rats, trust me. I’m not going to engage in the animal welfare debate here- I’m sorry, I’m just not. But I think we should all give our rodent friends some thanks, because without them, we would know very very little about how food (not to mention drugs and other chemicals) affect the body.  

If the animal model is good, the results will approximate what would happen if we did the same experiment with humans. Sometimes (as in the development of new medicines) researchers will then conduct a human trial. With food, as demonstrated above, it’s more complex than this, but some researchers have tried other ways to understand the effect of food directly on humans. For example, scanning the brains of people who are obese has shown that there are observable changes to their brain anatomy, similar in type and amount to what has been seen in the brains of people with drug addictions. While this particular research (find it here) doesn’t prove a sugar addiction, it does show that something addictive, or very similar to addiction is going on for these people. 

However, I should point out that in a review of the literature on fructose, these Kiwis argued that while there is evidence for a link between sugar and addiction, there is a need for more research. They state that “In humans, carbohydrade craving has often been reported in obese people, although a full withdrawal syndrome has not been described”. I think David Gillespie and others who have followed the Sweet Poison Quit Plan would disagree- they have described it- but of course, until it is in the medical literature in a well-validated form (and even probably then) sugar as an addictive substance, rather than a rather yummy and mostly harmless sweetener will remain controversial.

What does this mean for you or me? (Selfishly, I’m more concerned about me at the moment). Well, I think that sugar is (very probably) addictive, and that if I take sugar out of my diet for more than a short amount of time, I am likely to experience withdrawal symptoms. God help me: I am a stay at home mum with a 1 year old to take care of, shaking hands ain’t going to be fun (on the other hand, withdrawal when having to go to work would not be fun either, so I won’t complain, promise). I mentioned in my first post that I have withdrawn from nicotine before, so when I stopped sugar (1 week ago today!) I knew to some extent what to expect when. I expected to want want WANT it. I expected to be antsy, needing distraction, unable to focus. I expected headaches, a funny feeling behind the eyes. I expected to be a bit snappy (or a lot snappy).

Maybe this is one of those times when expecting the worst has been for the best. I’ve not experienced much of the above, at least not to the level that I expected it. Reading the forums on the Sweet Poison and How Much Sugar websites shows me that there are varied experiences with the withdrawal phase, which seems to last about a month. My worst times this week have been when I inadvertently ate some sugar in food and felt horrible (and with all the symptoms above) afterwards- once I didn’t even realise I had eaten the sugar until I felt yuck and then checked the label on what I had eaten.

But overall, so far (touch wood) I seem to be having a fairly easy run. Maybe my practice with cigarettes has been helpful? (so perhaps I should smoke again, to reinforce my fantastic quitting abilities??) (Just kidding mum!). I think my experience has also been helped by my conviction that this is the right thing for me to do. I’m not eating sugar because I don’t want to eat sugar, so the neurochemicals can do their worst, I’m not listening (la la la). I’ll probably have to revisit the addiction topic later though, at least to update you on whether things change over the next few weeks, but also because as my hilarious remark above proves, just because one is not currently chemically addicted to something (like cigarettes) doesn’t mean that one is free from them either. I always want a cigarette and perhaps I always will. I don’t know if it will be the same for sugar. Hope not.

Overall, I believe that the rats are on the right track with this. We should listen to them more, maybe. 

Going off the grid

I’ve embarked on something this week which has made me feel like I am, maybe for the first time, a bit of a renegade. Or maybe that’s just the (lack of) sugar talking...

Let me explain. This Monday, I stopped eating sugar. I quit. I know, GASP, right? Ok , well for me it is a GASP, worthy of the capital letters and all. I’m not going to bore you with describing how much of a sugar-aholic I am (was?), but trust me, I could eat some big-ass sugar. And as a result, I have a big ass. Ha ha.

(I hope my mum is not going to read this blog).

For 6 days now, I have been sugar free- or, as sugar free as possible in this oh so sweetened, sugary and deliciously syrupy world. I started this process (which really is a quitting process, much like quitting cigarettes, and trust me, I know on that one as well) after reading a few posts by David Gillespie on his blog Raisin-Hell, and, out of curiosity, checking out his website.  I think I was attracted firstly by the fact that David lost 40kg ‘just’ by cutting sugar out of his diet. Wow! After my own experiences of short-term but ultimately un-maintainable weight loss using the usual suspects (Weight watchers, Lite N Easy et al), I was ready for something new, and maybe something radical. Cutting out sugar? Well, that would pretty much just mean not eating lollies, right? And I don’t eat them (much) when I am dieting anyway. (Actually, I do, I just do something like skip a meal so that I have enough Weight Watchers ‘ProPointsTM’ left to eat the lollies). Not eating sugar would just take self-control, and I can (probably) do that (maybe).

But after ordering the book, signing on to the support/information website www.howmuchsugar.com (both of which cost me less than signing up to Weight Watchers, let alone the ongoing monthly WW fee, just by the way), I now feel like the weight loss will be secondary to what I gain if I can follow this through.

I’m not going to rehash all of the copious research that David has done, described in his book Sweet Poison, which tells David’s story of discovering the perils of sugar and deciding to quit (there is also a summary in his follow-up book Sweet Poison Quit Plan which focuses on how to quit sugar yourself, should you want to). I wouldn’t want to get done for plagiarism, for a start. Some of the things that stood out for me I want to explore in this blog, doing my own research if necessary.  But here is part of the case that David puts forward, in a nutshell (nuts being allowed in his quit plan):

1.       The availability and consumption of sugar have increased DRAMATICALLY over the past 100-odd years.

2.      Over-weight and the related diseases such as diabetes, heart and liver diseases and a host of others have also increased DRAMATICALLY and continue to rise.

3.       There is research- and I mean strong and impressive research (trust me a third time, dear anonymous reader, in my old life I was a health researcher)- that indicates a clear and causal link between point 1 and point 2.

The research doesn’t point to sugar per se as being a threat to our health and (my) ability to wear size 10 clothing, but specifically to the fructose part of sugar (sugar being 50% fructose, and 50% glucose). Fructose is a nasty little bugger. While insulin is released to mop up the glucose that we eat, our livers have to deal with the fructose. The liver doesn’t know what to do with fructose, so it turns it into fat. Simple, and surprisingly well documented.   Surprising to me, anyway, because my view of sugar was always that it was not as bad as fat, and that the only way sugar contributed to my weight was if I ate ‘too much’, meaning that my energy intake was greater than the energy that I used. (Therefore, I could skip a meal and eat a packet of Allens Party Mix). Turns out it is both simpler and more complex than this.

I want to use this blog to record my progress toward becoming 'sugar free', and along the way, look into the sugar story and try and understand what we know and what we don’t about what we eat and what it does to our bodies. I’ve presumed a lot for a long time, based on, well, not much really. The Life Be In It ads in the 1980s with Norm sitting on the couch (‘eat more breads and cereals, eat more breads and cereals, eat more fruits and vegetables, and be more ACTIVE’) spring to mind, and I think we had a few domestic science lessons in year 7 about nutrition...I’ve certainly never been inspired to look into it in more detail. I’ve been too busy waiting for my weight to magically right itself or to find the willpower within to stop myself from being so fat and lazy. I’ve got a 1 year old son, so a special interest to me is understanding nutrition and healthy eating for toddlers. I might include some recipes, if I try them.

I definitely don’t aim to replicate what David Gillespie has done- so, if you want to cut to the chase and understand why David calls sugar ‘Sweet Poison’ and why people like me have decided to quit sugar, I’d encourage you to read his books or go to his website or blog (no one is paying me to say this, I promise). This blog is just my story, and the opinions and interpretations (including misinterpretations) are mine.

How does this all make me feel like a renegade? I’ll see if I can put it into words (and if not, maybe I shouldn’t be attempting a blog...)

If you want to stop eating fructose, you have to stop eating commercially produced sugar (table, caster, brown, raw, icing, and more), foods made of this sugar (lollies come to mind), and foods to which this sugar is added (practically everything you can think of from yoghurt to Hoi Sin sauce to tinned corn to chicken flavoured chips). Practically every aisle in the supermarket is a minefield. Or a sugar field. Ha ha.

It is completely possible to eat (and eat well) while keeping fructose almost completely out of the equation (except in fruit and veg which I will have to leave for another post). But, you have to go back to basics, shop carefully and be prepared to make your own when the commercial brands of foods you love contain fructose, which they nearly always will. For example, you can have chocolate, but it has to be sweetened with something that doesn’t contain (or act in the body like) fructose. So...not Cadbury. Or any of the commercial chocolates in Australia. I may have to make my own. Like those who live off the electricity grid, producing their own power so that they don’t need to purchase what the rest of us purchase without thinking about it, I feel like I’m going off the sugar grid.  I’ll still eat what you eat (mostly) I just won’t do it with most of what is in the supermarket. This may not be that revolutionary to you, but it is to me.

I’ll let you know if it makes a difference to me. I hope it will.