Quitting sugar – what helps and what doesn’t week 1

It’s now almost one week since we said good bye to sugar, and let us tell you – it’s hard when you’re going through some ups and downs in your life.

In fact, we're not proud of that, but we actually already broke many rules of the challenge. And yes, we did eat some pastries and honey.

But what do we do when we fall off the wagon?

We dust ourselves off, learn from what happened and get back on the wagon while it’s still there. No waiting for the next one.

So we're not a robot who can quit all sugar from one day to another. Big deal.

We're not gonna beat myself up because of that.

The point in doing anything is anyway to get better at it.

Not to be solid.

So even if we couldn’t resist sugar altogether these last days, at least we ate it more rarely.

Here’s what worked for us and what didn’t last week.

How to quit sugar, and all of it

What helped

A few things helped us avoid eating sugar all the time. While we wasn’t successful at not eating ANY sugar, these 5 “tricks” made a difference in how much sugar we ate.

1. Lemons

Lemons are weird creatures. We used to hate their guts, but the more we ate them, the more we liked them.

And now we love them.

Funny enough their strong fresh, but sour taste helps us a lot when it comes to avoiding sugar.

We guess some people explain this with the fact that lemons are acidic and slow down the breaking down of sugar. Which then makes you crave sugar less.

Whatever the reason, lemons help us the most with sugar cravings.

What we would do (when we can) when we crave something sweet is just juice a lemon and add it to a glass of water.

We then feel fresher and am not in the mood for a cake.

This is counterintuitive and we have to make myself do it, because it’s cold outside (help us, help meeee) and the last thing we actually “want” is something fresh.

But once we've juiced that lemon, it works.

2. Eating mango or banana when we crave something sweet

If you have ever eaten a chocolate and right after that a banana, you will know what we mean here.

That banana doesn’t taste sweet at all. But.

Eat a banana when you crave something sweet – it’s sweet and it actually will solve your cravings.

We're now on a new wave and have switched to mangoes.

Next week probably pine-apple.

All satisfying and fresh. All these fruits do have a lot of sugar, but they’re also antioxidant-rich and if you stick to 1 serving (about 1/2 cup) you don’t eat too much sugar.

Plus, come on. We didn’t get in that whole sugar trap because we were eating too many mangoes.

3. Drinking water

We don’t nearly talk enough about water here.

In fact we never talk about water.

And there’s a reason for that. We think it’s boring.

After all every healthy eating article online and offline tells us to drink more water.

Now we know that it’s boring, but drinking more water helped us with our sugar cravings.

It actually helped us avoid sugar.

You see, funny enough, when we drink enough water and feel hydrated we never crave bad stuff. We never crave sugar. We would crave something fresh like an orange, but never cake or chocolate.

Of course just a sip of water doesn’t work. We had to drink at least a glass. But hey, it’s a double win for our skin and body – not only don’t we ruin our collagen with sugar, we also moisturize our skin from the inside.

4. Eating more nuts, oats and nut butters

Sounds like we're trying to get fatter here, but these foods are all actually shown to also help with weight loss.

Since we know we like more cakes, doughnuts, muffins (we think you get the point) than actual sweets (chocolate, candy or gummy bears <- we hate those small freaks) – these foods work perfectly for us.

On our best mornings we'd eat a banana oatmeal with some nuts and then not crave sugar at all during the day.

And sometimes we'd even eat that oatmeal later in the day, because it’s warm, sweet and satisfies our cravings for a sweet and comforting dessert.

5. Preparing smoothies as a snack

It’s hard for us to eat sweets after we had something as refreshing as a smoothie.

We mean, it’s not impossible, and we can totally force myself to eat cake after that smoothie, but it’s less likely.

So for us the time when we crave sweets most is late afternoon.

Around 3-4pm. We just need something.

And what do we have available?

Yes, sweets.

That is if you’re not prepared. If you’re prepared and have a smoothie or another healthy snack (even if it’s one with veggies like this one).

What didn’t help

And these are the evil things that made us reach for sugar again and eat it like it didn’t matter.

1. Sitting for too long

One of the things we hate most about the way we all live today is that we sit most of the time.

That sitting is like a poison on its own, but as often in life it comes hand in hand with another evil creature – SUGAR.

Whenever we sit down to do something on the computer or to watch a movie we start craving sugar.

We don’t believe them.

And quite honestly, we don’t think eating fruit when we're working at the computer will ever work for us.

But who knows. We might as well try it. Maybe it doesn’t just look pretty, but works.

Anyway. Our bet is we get physically bored when we're sitting for a longer period of time and we need something to make us happy and tell us that we will survive this boring period.

So yeah. Sugar.

So for this week we have made it our mission to not sit for long periods.

2. Waiting too long to have a normal meal

It’s ridiculous. We sit all day long and think about food most of the time. Yet. We somehow still struggle to find time to eat a proper meal these days. This being or feeling busy all the time thing is annoying. One of the more serious reasons we ate sugar last week was because we hadn’t eaten anything else. It was simple, it was there and we were hungry. So again: Have some healthy snacks with you if you’re also trying to quit sugar. Be prepared. And don’t let yourself get too hungry because once you go by a store or see a chocolate bar anywhere – you’re gonna buy and eat it.

So this week this is our thing. Have healthy snacks and don’t let myself get too hungry. Which brings us to our next point.

3. Eating out

We think some time needs to pass for us to be able to eat out without craving any sugar. See last week we ate at our favorite Asian place a Thai curry and it was all healthy and satisfying. But…when we're eating out, we still need something sweet afterwards. That’s no different than when we eat at home, but at home we have some yogurt and berries, nuts and can fix myself a healthy “treat” quickly. We can’t do that when we're eating out. And also there are so many satisfying looking choices. It’s just simple to get a muffin, when it’s right there. So for this week: no eating out, until we've reset a little.

4. Drinking coffee

Besides being dehydrating and bad for our thyroid, coffee always brings his jerk friends sugar and milk along. So while there might be some people who love coffee and feel that it helps them crave sugar less, for most of us – who are weak and like the less bitter acidic version of coffee – aka cappucino it’s not a friend. It’s a trigger. It’s a trigger to desire more sugar. Because, hey if you don’t pour in at least a tsp of sugar into your cup, you’ll probably have something sweet on the side. So yes, another thing to keep our eye on – coffee.

5. Eating bread (we KNOW!)

Last but not least – we eat pretty clean, but…Bread is something we need in our life. And, no we don’t mean whole grain bread. Yes, it’s good too, but white bread? Come on…whoever you are, if you posess some taste buds, admit it! But bread is not that beneficial for weight loss and we noticed it actually makes us want sugar more. On top some breads are actually made with sugar. And that’s the last thing we're gonna watch out for this week…we're even afraid to say it – we'll eat less bread (crying a little).

And that’s it. Those are all the things we noticed. We also noticed that we haven’t done any exercise last week and they’re also supposed to help with sugar.

So we'll have to try different options.