No Sugar in March!
I’ve been attending a dance aerobics class at the Orem Fitness Center. I absolutely love this class! It’s such a great workout, and the instructor, Nina, is fabulous. She recently challenged her students to go without sugar for the month of March, specifically because Easter is in March this year and we all tend to consume WAY too much sugar around Easter!
So…despite my initial doubts in my ability to do this…I am going to cut out refined white sugar (this includes sucrose, high fructose corn syrup, etc.) from my diet. Nina promised a flatter stomach, we’ll see. I think the hardest thing for me will be the chocolate. Nina said we can have one serving of dark chocolate each week, since it has health benefits. I will be looking forward to that!
I’ve been alerted, recently, to the dangers of Aspartame (an artificial sweetener) and so I am looking for things sweetened with Splenda or Sucralose. If you know of any products that actually taste good and use those sweeteners, let me know! I am specifically looking for a good drink (like Crystal Light, which has Aspartame). I recently bought Breyer’s Sugar Free Double Churn Vanilla Ice Cream sweetened with Splenda and was quite pleased! I also tried a sugar-free dessert at the Olive Garden last week that tasted amazing, so it is possible to eat a sugar-free diet and not compromise taste. Another great snack for those quitting sugar is dried fruit. So yummy!
Here’s an update as of day 3: I realized this morning that all the cold cereal in the house has sugar in it. Bummer! I will need to go to the store and get some sugar free cereal. This morning I had pancakes with bananas and blueberry juice (drained from a can of blueberries) on top. It was actually quite delicious!
Last night we went to the Roberts to play games. They always have tons of treats, and it was very difficult for me not to eat any Oreos! I was so proud of myself when we left and I hadn’t consumed one! I haven’t noticed any changes in the way I look or feel yet, but I probably still need to cleanse my system of any sugar still remaining (I had a bunch of chocolate chip cookies the last night of February!!)
Wish me luck!
March 4th, 2008 at 9:35 am
I’m so proud of you! Nathan challenged me not to eat sugar for only one week, and I could’t even make it more than one day! But I love dark chocolate, so when I feel like I need something sweet, I try to stick with that. Well, good luck and let me know how it goes!!
March 10th, 2008 at 10:40 am
But as you read here about Dark Chocolate Benefits they also say that you need to consider the detriments of the extra fat and calories. But you’ve been doing a great job! I’m sure you can keep it up for one month! Don’t you feel good to give it up for a bit?
March 13th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I’ve got a story that will scare you off Aspartame forever. Remind me sometime and I’ll tell you. From what I understand the soda companies lobbied (read bribed) the FDA pretty hard to allow it for diet soda. The FDA initially was going to ban it. But that could be an urban ledgend, I should look it up on snopes sometime…