I’ve been sugar-free for 16 days now. With a minuscule exception.** Huge. I’ve employed a range of tricks for quitting.
What’s been trickiest? Chocolate? Dessert? Nope. Breakfast.
Breakfast is dripping in sugar. Cereal, muesli, muffins, banana bread, fruit salad, yoghurt, jam, peanut butter. Even Promite!!! If you eat out or on the run, it’s worse. Try ordering even a porridge (in summer)… you have to specify no honey, no compote. And then it’ll come out drenched in low-fat yoghurt, which is brimful of sugar.
A tub of low-fat yoghurt (200ml) contains about 6-8 teaspoons of sugar. That stuff they serve at cafes? Even more…
Me, I’ve been mostly eating:
* poached eggs on toast, sometimes with bacon
* millet toast spread with cashew and turmeric spread from Suveran.
* avocado and vegemite on toast (gluten free)
* porridge “sweetened” with a little coconut milk and cinnamon, with yoghurt and nuts
* haloumi cheese grilled with sardines and olives
* smoothies made with a handful of frozen berries or a frozen banana…WHAT?! **Yes, bananas are full of sugar (berries are OK). But here’s the thing. My principles take over. I had 5 bananas in my freezer and given the shortage and given I don’t waste food ever (not even the stalks on spinach. Or sweet potato peel), I’ve been eating half at a time. My little bourgeouis experiment is not that important!
I’ve also been on the look-out for fruit and sugar-free muesli. I’ve posted a few below.
Other things to look out for:
* Chai tea – they often put honey or palm sugar in the mix
* drink full-fat milk with your coffee…the fat helps with sugar-cravings
* don’t drink juice. Veggie juice is ok, so long as it’s got no fruit juice in it (carrot and beetroot also contain a lot of sugar…be careful). A good substitute is coconut water.
* nuts are good! I eat a few after breakfast to curb the sugar grasp
But first.
I got David Gillespie, author of Sweet Poison, to share his thoughts:
Sugar avoidance can eliminate whole food groups, not just chocolate and ice-cream. Take a walk down the breakfast cereal aisle and you will be struggling to find a single product that doesn’t have significant amounts of sugar.
Breakfast can be an enormous source of sugar in a ‘healthy’ diet.
Eating a heart foundation approved cereal (like Kellogg’s Just Right) and a glass of apple juice for breakfast will add up to almost half a kilo of sugar by the end of the week.
That’s half a kilo of sugar in your diet before you even push back from the breakfast bowl, before you crack open a chocolate wrapper and before you tuck into an energy drink at morning tea time.