I love dessert. I love ice cream. I love cake. I love cookies. Okay I just love anything with sugar. I didn't always love these things. Sure I liked them but when I was pregnant with my 3rd son I developed a sweet craving. I went from not being able to eat sweets in the 1st trimester to eating several everyday. I feel like I was always drinking fruit juice or eating dessert. I thought that maybe once he was born I could go back to eating maybe one dessert a day. Man was I wrong. Instead of decreasing my dessert consumption I increased it. I could eat 4 cookies in one sitting. What! I used to be satisfied with just 3 M&Ms. Yes you read that right, years ago when I wanted something sweet I would eat 3 M&Ms or 1 Hersey Kiss and that was all.
I knew I had to do something. I tried a sugar free diet before but because of the sugar withdrawal I had headaches, depression, and increased anxiety. It wasn't worth it at the time so I fell off the wagon. I knew I needed to make a change for good at my cousin's wedding. I had 2 pieces of cake, 3 cookies, and strawberries and cream. That is when I decided that the first diet change I would make was to cut out added sugar.
There are programs you can follow to cut out sugar but a lot of them have you cutting out ALL sugar. I am taking a different approach. I have eliminated ADDED sugar. Natural sugar is important to your body. Not only does it help give you energy but it also has nutrients and fiber that your body needs. Processed or refined sugar does not have these things. When they process the sugar all the nutrients are stripped out and nothing but a pure carbohydrate is left.
Your body does not digest pure carbohydrates like this very well so it is deposited throughout your body pulling nutrients that are needed elsewhere. Have you ever had a sugar crash?
Not eating sugar when I have been eating so much for so long is a big change. I have been craving chocolate during the day. When this happens I try to eat fruit. I have been eating a lot of grapefruit! I know that I have had this diet change for a short time but already I am feeling better. I don't feel bloated and for me that is a big deal. I am not expecting a change over night but I am happy to see a difference already.
I know that there are a lot of people out there that instead of completely cutting out added sugar they will just use artificial sugar. That is great for some people but for me it wasn't something I wanted to do. First of all I would rather eat something that came from nature not a laboratory. Second is all the different articles and information you can find on artificial sweeteners. There is information that says it causes cancer, depression, anxiety, headaches, and dizziness just to name a few.
There are also studies that have been done that do not find a correlation between the sweeteners and these ailments. For me I am not willing to take the chance. The big change in my thought process about artificial sweeteners came a few years ago when I was taking a chemistry class. My teacher was talking about aspartame, which is one of the most well known artificial sweeteners. He talked about how when the soda or what ever has the aspartame in it expires the aspartame goes through a chemical change and it is no longer sweet.
That freaked me out! I like knowing what I am putting into my body and I don't like how it changes to something that I don't even know what it is. So after that I decided if I was going to consume anything sweet it would have real sugar in it. Lets think about how consuming artificial sweeteners also makes you crave more so sure your calorie count is down with the treat you have. BUT you crave more so you are more likely to consume more. Doesn't that defeat the purpose of "diet" food?
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