Thursday, October 10, 2013

Food: Back on the Wagon


Did I mention that I fell off the low-sugar wagon? Yeah. Not so much fell as leaped, claws extended toward the nearest candy treat. Stress, work, travel to That City Where St. Cupcake Lives, and it all fell apart.

Saturday I'm starting again. I'm prepped. The sliced turkey, olives, and Greek yogurt are ready in the fridge. (Greek yogurt, you might ask? That's milk, and milk has carbs, you may say. Yes, I know, but a limited dose of the stuff worked well last time.) We've got plenty of teabags for iced tea.

So what's the plan? The same one that worked last time. Starting Saturday, no candy, no cake, no sugar-bearing condiments, no sugared drinks, no fruit juice drinks, nothing that's hiding sugar in its depths, except for:

  • One piece of chocolate, per day.
  • One bowl of Greek yogurt with one tablespoon of honey, per day.
  • One piece of fruit, per day.
  • One Coke, per week.
  • One full-on sugary treat (doughnut, cupcake, candy bar, whatever), per week.

I realize that that's probably a year's worth of carbs for a true low-carber.

Last time I did this I cut out the sugar, waited a few weeks, and then cut the simple starches. This time I think I'm going to try to cut them both at the same time, because I think that just extended the misery--once they were both pretty minimal, I felt OK and was no longer tempted to detach and eat the limbs of innocent passers-by. So, no potatoes, no white rice, no potato chips, no bread, and so on and so on. For the first few days, in fact, I'll probably also cut out the whole-grain, er, grains, restricting my bready eating to the crispbread that I make my turkey sandwiches with. I'd cut that out if I could, but I just can't; I've tried. Turkey without anything filling the role of bread depresses me.

Oh, and no milk. Lotta sugar in milk. Also, Himself thinks it makes me crazy.

So, turkey. And chicken. And pickles and olives and vegetables. Massive quantities of them, and zero effort to control fat. This is a single-topic diet. There will be butter on the vegetables and mayonnaise on the turkey-and-crispbread. (I just rushed to check the mayo jar for sugar. Nope. Thank goodness.)

Wish me luck. And best keep your limbs out of reach, for a little while.

Image: By Uwe Hermann. Wikimedia Commons.

4 comments:

  1. My sincere best wishes for your dietary success!

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  2. That's pretty much that Hay diet, right?

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  3. Thanks, Christine! I started the first day by buying the grocery deli out of chicken wings, and that got me through the first twenty-four sugar-free hours.

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  4. Vanessa! I'd never heard of the Hay diet, but now I had to Google it. I suspect not entirely, because the Hay diet appears to recommend one meal per day that includes sugars and starches, while my theoretical goal is to avoid those.

    I think it's closer to the Atkins Diet, though a laughably un-strict version--the Atkins Diet severely restricts even green vegetables, while I'm eating all of those that I want.

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