Tag Archives: sugar

Gardening Makes Eating Worth It

  By |
Leave a comment

Gardening makes eating worth it. I know that probably sounds totally bizarre, and it might even explain why I’m not over weight, but being one who is addicted to sugar and is trying so hard to stop, this statement is spot on. I use sugar like a drug. While I am using sugar, my body hurts less; I feel like I can relax and think clearer, and then when I’m done down my ice cream (my very favorite form of sugar), I go back to feeling absolutely disgusting. In fact, many times I even feel worse, because I over ate, or over dosed.

As a teenager, I marveled at the girls that could just down sugar without a second thought. I wasn’t worried about how much weight they wouldn’t gain, because that wasn’t a problem for me. I was wondering how in the world they could possibly not get sick from eating so much sugar. It wasn’t until I married my husband that I found someone like me. My sister-in-law has the same problem I do. We both get ill from eating too much sugar. Being different people, there are different types and amounts of sugar that will set us off, but we both understand the nausea that accompanies a poor choice of too much dessert or snacks or breakfast…

These all came from my garden and were wonderfully sweet.

So, back to my wonderful garden. Do you remember the day you learned that tomatoes are a fruit? And you couldn’t possibly imagine how that could be, because they’re not even sweet? No store bought tomato is ever going to be the sweet you think of when talking about fruit. It simply can’t happen. The tomatoes are picked well before they are ripe, and then shipped in a truck that ripens them along the way. A tomato that is not picked red off the vine will never be sweet. (And those tomatoes on the vine don’t count either. They just cut the vine and let the tomatoes ripen on a cut vine.) A tomato that is allowed to ripen completely on a vine that is attached to roots in the ground will be the sweetest tomato you ever eat. Not only that, it will be the reddest tomato you ever eat. (Unless of course you are eating an orange or yellow variety.)

And that is why growing a garden makes eating worth it for me. Cane sugar, the kind of sugar I have yet to give up, (Somehow I managed to give up the more heavily manufactured kinds of sugar/sweeteners.) plagues me with temptation daily. So, when I take a bite out of one of my home grown tomatoes, and revel in the delicious sweetness that I was not only able to produce, but am also able to eat without any of the ill side effects of other sugary foods, garden definitely makes eating worth it.

No Sugar, No Artificial Sweeteners

  By |
Leave a comment

On January 30, 2012, my sister-in-law and I started three months of no sugar and no artificial sweeteners, though honey is okay in moderation.  We both get what we call “sugar sickness,” which is where we physically feel ill when we eat too much sugar, and we have yet to find an artificial sweetener that doesn’t have some kind of ill effect on us as well.  Basically we want to detox from eating too many sweets so that come May, we can start anew with the resolve to simply cut back on sugar.

This is a huge feat that we are trying to accomplish, so we decided to help each other out by doing it together.  Also, we didn’t want to set ourselves up for failure, so we gave ourselves a few treats to help us stay strong in tempting situations when we are otherwise doing very well.

The first thing to address was cold treats, like ice cream.  She loves Red Mango, so that is her cold treat and reward for avoiding everything else.  I found plain frozen yogurt at Yogurt Bliss, so that is my cold treat and reward.  Both of these are had in moderation, because eating them every day would basically defeat the purpose of even trying this.

She is allowing herself 70% cocoa to curb the chocolate cravings.  There is some pretty amazing 70% cocoa out there, and she is finding it.  I drink 100% juice, while she avoids it, because the natural sugars are too concentrated for her body.  She eats Greek yogurt, because of its benefits and the great flavors, while I just eat plain yogurt, because I don’t really like the added sugar in flavored yogurts.

When family events come around where sugar will obviously be present, we try to bring fruit or some dessert without sugar so that we don’t slip up.  I made a chocolate cake with applesauce as the sweetener when our aunt had a birthday.  It wasn’t the most amazing cake, but it gave us something to eat while everyone else was eating some really awesome looking cake.

I hope this inspires others to give this a try.  Don’t set yourself up for failure, and get a buddy to hold yourself accountable to.

Check out my sister-in-laws blog here.

Healthy Eating – Ice Cream

  By |
Leave a comment

Part of healthy eating is understanding what your body really wants when you’re craving something you probably shouldn’t eat.  For example, a sugar craving usually means your body really needs protein.  It sounds kind of strange, but if you’re dying for some sugar, eat a piece of cheese instead.

In regards to ice cream, your body is craving the fat from the cream, salt, it’s in there I promise, and sugar, obviously.  So, find a different way to satisfy those cravings.  I have found that an orange and cottage cheese satisfies all of the cravings: fat and salt in the cottage cheese, and sugar in the orange.  You can use any orange-like fruit as well.  I really like this with clementines.  Plus, they taste pretty good together.