Sugar Detox - Day 6

Psychologically, today was the hardest for me.  I really wanted sweets.  I even had a dream that I had one drink of my sweet tea, and it was so wonderful, then my alarm went off.  Obviously, I woke up disappointed.

There is this sweet lady at church who brings cake every week, and I always have a piece of it (along with everyone else).  But I resisted.  I didn't stay in the entryway (where all the snacks are) talking before church.  I walked on into the sanctuary.  I had my cashews and water bottle in my purse.  I was ready.  I even was able to eat some cashews towards the beginning of the service.  Then during the sermon I had to go out in the entryway with baby Sara...usually I grab a piece of cake or a pretzel or a cookie or something while I'm out there, but today I couldn't.  And I had to watch other kids getting cookies and snacks.  But I resisted.

On the way home from church, we decided to get salads from McDonald's drive-thru for lunch.  I picked out the croutons (and peppers) from both salads and picked out the cheese from mine.  I added a whole avocado to both salads.  As I suspected, the vinaigrette dressing that I love has sugar in it.  So, I put our usual oil and Italian seasoning on the salad.  It was pretty good.  And it was less work than making the whole thing from scratch.  I think if we were ever in a pinch, I wouldn't feel too bad about eating a salad from McDonald.'s, even with the vinaigrette dressing.  I just felt incredibly unsatisfied and wanted sweets more and more.  But I resisted.  I just ate a bunch of cashews a little while later as a snack.

I also was feeling really stressed this afternoon while I was working on our finances.  It really bothers me how behind I am, and I realized a few things that I had missed and was really beating myself up about it.  Naturally, I really wanted some chocolate.  I had started working on the finances after lunch, thinking that it would distract me from wanting sweets, but instead I saw receipt after receipt from McDonald's, Subway, milkshakes, spaghetti carbonara, etc., and that made me feel worse.  But I resisted. 

I also had an apple as a late afternoon snack, and I have the same problem I've always had with apples - I get hungry again really quickly.  Maybe it is better as a dessert.  I don't know.  So I ate more cashews again as we were putting Sara to bed.

I'm really starting to think that I maybe I am one of the 10% of Americans that the article says are addicted to sugar.  I eat sugar and I feel good, then I crash and feel like my blood sugar is low, so I eat more sugar, and the cycle continues.  My dad is diabetic, so it could run in the family.  I've always felt I was a bit hypoglycemic because of how I get extremely weak if I don't eat.   So far I've felt pretty good without sugar (except for the first day).  Maybe this change will really help me.

For dinner we made the soup we had originally planned for lunch.  I have my groceries delivered, and they only brought one steak instead of two like I had ordered (they were big and I was planning to eat half of a steak per day), so we will just split the one steak tomorrow for dinner.  The soup was actually much better than I thought it would be.  I had no idea how to season it without using some kind of a base, so I just kind of threw some spices in (salt, garlic, oregano, and parsley).  For the crackers, I didn't know what would be a "high fiber cracker", but we had some saltine-like crackers that had fiber and no sugar, so we just ate those.  I googled what would be a serving, and it is only 5 crackers!  I almost put them all in my soup, then I remembered that we would probably have a second bowl of soup and saved three of them for the second bowl.  It was really good.  I think the addition of the crackers helped as well, even if it wasn't as many as I would've normally used.

Here it is now, the end of the day, and I'm feeling pretty good.  I'm proud of myself for not giving into the temptation to eat sweets out of habit or as a coping mechanism for stress.