Thirty-one days into this year and as of the last 7-10 days I've noticed the following positive changes:
1) I am sleeping so much better! I am not what you would call a "good" sleeper. Of course, my only comparison is my husband who is one of those people that puts his head on the pillow and is knocked-out cold. Even when he wakes up, he's back asleep before he can even remember being up in the first place. It normally takes me a bit to fall asleep, I wake up a few times every night, and at least 3-4 times a week I lie awake in the middle of the night for awhile (30 min to 2 hours!). Until this past week! I have been sleeping through the night. And yes, I used that phrase, once you have kids the phrase "sleeping through the night" becomes part of your daily vocabulary. And when I do wake up (due to the two kids, snoring husband, etc) I am falling back asleep in about 5 minutes!!
A big difference is that when something does wake me up (crying baby, husband twitching in his sleep), I don't wake up wired. That was the sugar's doing. Without it, my body feels tired (as it should at 3 in the morning!) and I'm able to fall back asleep really quickly.
2) My temperament is more mellow. I'm going to get more into this on Monday's post about the link between my anxiety and sugar, but I can already tell I am am little calmer these days. There have been moments when I know in the past I would have lost my patience and my lid would have popped. Not as much these days. Although I won't lie and say I never lose my temper. I do have two kids in diapers. Sugar-free doesn't make you Mother Theresa.
3) I've lost about 5 pounds. I don't like to harp too much on the weight loss because it's not the most important reason for why I am doing this, but it's worth a mention and I'm not complaining! I actually think the weight loss is due more to not eating gluten. Grains (particularly those with gluten) are difficult to digest and can really bloat you.
So one month down, eleven to go! January was probably the toughest month physically but the easiest mentally. Motivation is always high at the beginning, it's keeping up the momentum that is the hard part. Bring on February!
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Wednesday, January 30, 2013
Prep-ahead Meal #1
Ok so this meal isn't exactly "prep-ahead" but you can certainly do parts of it ahead of time and it is super simple to pull together at the end.
Grandma Sandy's Meatballs from a gluten-free blog. This is the Hubs' FAVORITE! Seriously, he's not one for showing much emotion, but I actually get a big grin on his face when he sees this heating up on the stove. It has a delicious mushroom sauce and he's in love with mushrooms.
I made a few changes for our house but if you follow the recipe as listed it will come out great. I use gluten-free bread crumbs (I may replace these with oats in the future). It makes a lot of meatballs, easily two meals for a family of four. I always take half of the meatballs and stick them in a zip-loc freezer bag to use again. Depending on how much mushroom sauce you like, you can stretch this out to two meals as well. The sauce actually freezes pretty well. You could certainly double the sauce and freeze for later as well. And if you serve it with rice you can freeze a batch of rice as well. So actually, the whole meal could be frozen for later use!
I use arrowroot powder instead of the cornstarch (I try to avoid corn, especially when at the beginning stages of sugar-free) and I serve it with egg noodles for the Hubs and my Music Man. The sauce definitely is comfort food and it lends itself to warm, thick noodles! I eat it over rice, but recently I've just been having the meatballs over a pile of cooked greens. I usually wilts greens with some onions and garlic for a side dish.
I think in the future I'll double the recipe and hopefully get 3-4 meals out of this.
Grandma Sandy's Meatballs from a gluten-free blog. This is the Hubs' FAVORITE! Seriously, he's not one for showing much emotion, but I actually get a big grin on his face when he sees this heating up on the stove. It has a delicious mushroom sauce and he's in love with mushrooms.
I made a few changes for our house but if you follow the recipe as listed it will come out great. I use gluten-free bread crumbs (I may replace these with oats in the future). It makes a lot of meatballs, easily two meals for a family of four. I always take half of the meatballs and stick them in a zip-loc freezer bag to use again. Depending on how much mushroom sauce you like, you can stretch this out to two meals as well. The sauce actually freezes pretty well. You could certainly double the sauce and freeze for later as well. And if you serve it with rice you can freeze a batch of rice as well. So actually, the whole meal could be frozen for later use!
I use arrowroot powder instead of the cornstarch (I try to avoid corn, especially when at the beginning stages of sugar-free) and I serve it with egg noodles for the Hubs and my Music Man. The sauce definitely is comfort food and it lends itself to warm, thick noodles! I eat it over rice, but recently I've just been having the meatballs over a pile of cooked greens. I usually wilts greens with some onions and garlic for a side dish.
I think in the future I'll double the recipe and hopefully get 3-4 meals out of this.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Feeling full!
Just a quick update. Four weeks in and today I actually feel satiated from my meals. Let me clarify, it's 5:30 and I'm getting dinner for my kids and have the option to dish out some soup for myself and I stopped because I realized I wasn't hungry. Since my lunch at 12:00, I've only had one carrot with some hummus. Normally I am ALWAYS hungry, or feel like I need something in my stomach (especially after 5 hours). Without sugar, my body can actually tell me when it truly needs food.
Getting back on the horse...
Two years ago, I had recently moved to Charlotte and was moving past the whole "just moved to a new place, have a 6 month old, have to get furniture, unpack, find a grocery store, meet a friend" crazy stage. I had started eating really healthy, was doing a lot of research online, and decided to sign up for an online program run by the Institute for Integrative Nutrition to get my health coaching certification. Two to three times a week I would put my son in his stroller and go for nice long walks while I listened to an array of classes taught by the world-leaders in alternative medicine. Topics ranged from diet to spirituality, vegetarian recipes to how to prepare grass-fed beef, and I felt so good listening to them. They motivated me to get healthier, fueled my disgust for the corporate and government BS that is out there about health, and helped me dream a pretty fantastic future that included being a health coach, running cooking classes, blogging, etc.
About 2/3 of the way into my program I became pregnant with my daughter. And while I tried super hard to eat healthy throughout my pregnancy (for the most part I did pretty well, especially during the first trimester) life began to intervene and I started to slip a little. Compared to what I ate prior to Charlotte, I was still doing great. But what really took a toll was the time I could spend learning about nutrition and keeping in touch with current news regarding health and diet. When my daughter was born I sunk into the abyss that is the first six months of a newborn. I took a little longer to emerge this time because I now had two kids depending on me for all of their needs.
But today, I finally feel like I have emerged. Well, at least in this new "two kids" kind of way. I have come to terms with the fact that as life with your first baby will never be like life before children, life with two will never be the same as life with one!
Today the sun is shining down here in the Carolinas and it is a beautiful 70 degrees out. While my Music Man was at preschool, I took my Little Peanut for a walk through the neighborhood and re-listened to one of the courses from my program. It was all about whole grains and I hope to some day write a little about what I learned. It felt so incredibly great to think about something that wasn't diapers or laundry and actually use my brain to process some really important information. And it motivated me once again to continue on my sugar-free whole foods quest.
I am hoping to listen to these courses more. I don't think two to three times a week is feasible right now, so I'll try for once a week. Baby steps, the only way to move :)
About 2/3 of the way into my program I became pregnant with my daughter. And while I tried super hard to eat healthy throughout my pregnancy (for the most part I did pretty well, especially during the first trimester) life began to intervene and I started to slip a little. Compared to what I ate prior to Charlotte, I was still doing great. But what really took a toll was the time I could spend learning about nutrition and keeping in touch with current news regarding health and diet. When my daughter was born I sunk into the abyss that is the first six months of a newborn. I took a little longer to emerge this time because I now had two kids depending on me for all of their needs.
But today, I finally feel like I have emerged. Well, at least in this new "two kids" kind of way. I have come to terms with the fact that as life with your first baby will never be like life before children, life with two will never be the same as life with one!
Today the sun is shining down here in the Carolinas and it is a beautiful 70 degrees out. While my Music Man was at preschool, I took my Little Peanut for a walk through the neighborhood and re-listened to one of the courses from my program. It was all about whole grains and I hope to some day write a little about what I learned. It felt so incredibly great to think about something that wasn't diapers or laundry and actually use my brain to process some really important information. And it motivated me once again to continue on my sugar-free whole foods quest.
I am hoping to listen to these courses more. I don't think two to three times a week is feasible right now, so I'll try for once a week. Baby steps, the only way to move :)
Monday, January 28, 2013
Why Am I Doing This?
One of the reasons why I shared this blog with friends and family at first was to help them gain a better understanding for why I am doing this sugar-free year. While they all love me, I know a lot of them are having a tough time wrapping their heads around this "sugar addiction" thing and why I have chosen to go cold turkey. I'm sure it seems rather extreme to some people. And I get it. Really, I do. So many of us struggle with eating well and almost all of the literature out there says to make small changes and not do anything too radical because that is tough to keep up with long term. I actually completely agree with this. I think most people should live their life with a 90/10 rule. Ninety percent of the time eat well and ten percent of the time cut yourself some slack. It's actually the main philosophy from the online program I completed.
The problem is, at this moment, I just can't do that.
As I've stated before, I believe I am physically addicted to sugar. Much like an alcoholic. The good news is that the human body is amazing in its ability to regenerate and recover. There is a very good chance that after a year of healing I can eat a little sugar without it affecting me so severely. There's also a good chance that part of this addiction has a huge emotional component, and that through blogging and discovering my emotional cues and patterns for overeating, I can overcome this as well. In those books on sugar addiction that I referred to in a past post, many people find that after a certain amount of time they can handle unrefined sugars. Natural sweeteners like honey, coconut sugar and maple syrup can be tolerated in small amounts. But, for some, they will always struggle with any kind of sugar. I try not to get too hung up on that because there's no sense worrying about that now. I know that I need to do this for more than a few months because that is what I have done before and I wasn't successful. So I assigned myself a year and I plan to stick to it and see what happens come January 2014.
Now with almost a month of blogging under my belt it's time to get this a little more organized. I knew that January was just the start and that my only goal was to make sure I wrote consistently. And I did that! There were a few days I didn't feel like writing but I sat down and made myself do it more often than not. I think I only missed a few days and I'm really proud of myself for that.
I'd like to organize my weeks a little more this upcoming month. So I've decided that every Monday (starting next week) I'm going to write a little bit about the reasons why I am doing this. I want to share all the changes I see when I'm sugar-free and why this really is a big decision for me with powerful and positive outcomes. And there's more to my diet than just sugar-free. I try to eat REAL food. And I'll define this more specifically as the year goes on. I've got seven reasons that I plan on addressing each week:
1) Anxiety
2) Fatigue
3) Long-term Health
4) Weight Loss
5) Support farmers and companies who care about the well-being of their customers and the planet
6) I LOVE Food
7) It Completes Me! (you may have to channel your inner-Oprah to stomach this particular post...)
The problem is, at this moment, I just can't do that.
As I've stated before, I believe I am physically addicted to sugar. Much like an alcoholic. The good news is that the human body is amazing in its ability to regenerate and recover. There is a very good chance that after a year of healing I can eat a little sugar without it affecting me so severely. There's also a good chance that part of this addiction has a huge emotional component, and that through blogging and discovering my emotional cues and patterns for overeating, I can overcome this as well. In those books on sugar addiction that I referred to in a past post, many people find that after a certain amount of time they can handle unrefined sugars. Natural sweeteners like honey, coconut sugar and maple syrup can be tolerated in small amounts. But, for some, they will always struggle with any kind of sugar. I try not to get too hung up on that because there's no sense worrying about that now. I know that I need to do this for more than a few months because that is what I have done before and I wasn't successful. So I assigned myself a year and I plan to stick to it and see what happens come January 2014.
Now with almost a month of blogging under my belt it's time to get this a little more organized. I knew that January was just the start and that my only goal was to make sure I wrote consistently. And I did that! There were a few days I didn't feel like writing but I sat down and made myself do it more often than not. I think I only missed a few days and I'm really proud of myself for that.
I'd like to organize my weeks a little more this upcoming month. So I've decided that every Monday (starting next week) I'm going to write a little bit about the reasons why I am doing this. I want to share all the changes I see when I'm sugar-free and why this really is a big decision for me with powerful and positive outcomes. And there's more to my diet than just sugar-free. I try to eat REAL food. And I'll define this more specifically as the year goes on. I've got seven reasons that I plan on addressing each week:
1) Anxiety
2) Fatigue
3) Long-term Health
4) Weight Loss
5) Support farmers and companies who care about the well-being of their customers and the planet
6) I LOVE Food
7) It Completes Me! (you may have to channel your inner-Oprah to stomach this particular post...)
Sunday, January 27, 2013
Stir-fry Recipe #1
I tried a new recipe tonight and it was a winner. Simple ingredients, can do some prep work ahead of time, and very simple to cook. This earns it a spot in my 20 recipes, under the stir-fry category.
It's from my new favorite blogger, the Wellness Mama: Chicken and Squash Vegetable Stir-fry
I only used one onion instead of two because the mountain of vegetables on my cutting board didn't seem like it would make it into the wok. I stuck to the spices she listed at the bottom, but next time I may add a little curry. I like that you can change the spices a bit to add some variety.
Today was a strange day because it kept feeling like a Saturday since the Hubs arrived last night from a business trip. But alas, it's Sunday, and the work week starts as soon as it ended. I am hopping my kiddos can ditch these colds they have so we can have some playdates. And I hope my little peanut stops waking up at 5:30. We shall see!
I've almost completed one month of my sugar-free year!
It's from my new favorite blogger, the Wellness Mama: Chicken and Squash Vegetable Stir-fry
I only used one onion instead of two because the mountain of vegetables on my cutting board didn't seem like it would make it into the wok. I stuck to the spices she listed at the bottom, but next time I may add a little curry. I like that you can change the spices a bit to add some variety.
Today was a strange day because it kept feeling like a Saturday since the Hubs arrived last night from a business trip. But alas, it's Sunday, and the work week starts as soon as it ended. I am hopping my kiddos can ditch these colds they have so we can have some playdates. And I hope my little peanut stops waking up at 5:30. We shall see!
I've almost completed one month of my sugar-free year!
Saturday, January 26, 2013
First Temptation Thwarted!
Today's the first day I had to have a little conversation with myself about whether or not to eat a certain food. I had fallen behind on my food prep, had been awake since 5:30 due to a certain little girl's current early schedule, and was at the end of a pretty long stretch without the Hubs home. The kids were down for their naps in the afternoon and I hadn't had time to really sit down and eat a legit meal yet (not something I normally do and I highly advise against it. Breakfast really is the most important meal of the day). One of the drawbacks of eating this way is there aren't many meals you can just open your fridge or pantry door and make in 2 minutes. So when you haven't prepared in advance and you're super worn out from the day it's tough to motivate to put in the effort to make a salad or cook up some rice or wilt some greens. Instead, you look at your son's leftover pancakes from breakfast for a good minute. You see them on the plate, just a few bites, and think to yourself that if you weren't living sugar free you would have already eaten those three hours ago when you were cleaning up the breakfast dishes. But there they still sit.
People often think the toughest thing about living sugar-free is not being able to eat legitimate desserts. Ice cream, chocolate cake, candy. My friends often apologize if they eat a cookie in front of me. Honestly, that isn't too difficult. Yes, there are times when I just want some chocolate or feel left out if people are celebrating a birthday with cake, but for the most part that doesn't get to me. I know I can't eat dessert, and dessert isn't necessary. It's not like I'm starving and the only option to eat is a huge batch of cookies.
The tough parts are when I literally can't find something to eat! It's days like today, when my only easy lunch options are carrot sticks with hummus and a bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon, peanut butter and coconut flakes. Those foods give me calories but are not what I had in mind for lunch. When my meals don't satisfy me then I start looking for something I shouldn't have...normally something with wheat, white flour, sugar and other processed junk.
But I didn't eat them! Woo-hoo! Instead, I got some more carrots out and sat down to watch some re-runs of The Office. That show seriously was so much better with Steve Carrell. Watched The Deposition today - when Jan tries to sue the company and brings Michael in for questioning. I laughed out loud at least four times. Laughing definitely gets your mind off food!
So I chalk today up to a big victory. This go around with sugar-free I just have so much more knowledge. I love that I know why I wanted those pancakes:
1) I needed something to eat
2) I haven't been doing a great job of putting variety into my diet or creating great tasty dishes for myself. This is when I start looking for sugary type stuff.
Hopefully I can find some time over the next week to prepare myself some food. Tomorrow I am starting on my 20 staple meals!
People often think the toughest thing about living sugar-free is not being able to eat legitimate desserts. Ice cream, chocolate cake, candy. My friends often apologize if they eat a cookie in front of me. Honestly, that isn't too difficult. Yes, there are times when I just want some chocolate or feel left out if people are celebrating a birthday with cake, but for the most part that doesn't get to me. I know I can't eat dessert, and dessert isn't necessary. It's not like I'm starving and the only option to eat is a huge batch of cookies.
The tough parts are when I literally can't find something to eat! It's days like today, when my only easy lunch options are carrot sticks with hummus and a bowl of oatmeal with cinnamon, peanut butter and coconut flakes. Those foods give me calories but are not what I had in mind for lunch. When my meals don't satisfy me then I start looking for something I shouldn't have...normally something with wheat, white flour, sugar and other processed junk.
But I didn't eat them! Woo-hoo! Instead, I got some more carrots out and sat down to watch some re-runs of The Office. That show seriously was so much better with Steve Carrell. Watched The Deposition today - when Jan tries to sue the company and brings Michael in for questioning. I laughed out loud at least four times. Laughing definitely gets your mind off food!
So I chalk today up to a big victory. This go around with sugar-free I just have so much more knowledge. I love that I know why I wanted those pancakes:
1) I needed something to eat
2) I haven't been doing a great job of putting variety into my diet or creating great tasty dishes for myself. This is when I start looking for sugary type stuff.
Hopefully I can find some time over the next week to prepare myself some food. Tomorrow I am starting on my 20 staple meals!
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