Sugar: Trick or Treat?

About 7 months ago, I gave up refined sugar.  Seriously. Since then, I have carefully avoided anything with white, cane or brown sugar in it…*

Yet this morning I bought chocolate: 2 medium-sized boxes of Roses chocolates and 3 assorted packets of “treat-sized” chocolates: Crunchie, Milky Way, Maltesers.

To give away, you understand, what with the festive season coming up.  Seriously.  I mean it when I say I will give that sugar away.  Although I’m having second thoughts about that plan to give it away as I type.

And I don’t mean because I want to eat the stuff.

Lots of stuff is like refined Sugar, it can feel good initially – and yet not be much good for anything else.

Which reminds me of a brilliant 4 point check-list I unearthed from an old and wonderful Anthony Robbins teaching CD:

1. Does it feel good?
2. Is it good for me?
3. Is it good for others?
4. Is it for the greater good?

When first I assessed my regular behaviours against that list, it was a bit of an eye-opener!  I’m now aiming for 4 pointers in life!  Or 3 pointers at least.  I am a bit more careful about 1 pointers…

Like a Magnum ice-cream for instance…

After my first month of not having sugar, everyone else in the family was having a Magnum ice-cream.  I watched.  I super-duper wanted a Magnum ice-cream for myself.

Not to succumb immediately to temptation, I had some fruit instead.  And I waited until the next day to see how I felt about my idea to eat an ice-cream…

I hesitated because I had been intending to properly give up sugar – maybe even for good this time…

Benefits of Giving up Sugar

I’d previously been dabbling with giving up sugar  – 40 days here, 70 days there.

That first time I gave up sugar, was during a specific period of prayer and fasting. That’s when I found that giving up sugar was actually doable.  Unless I was fasting I honestly never would have tried giving up sugar in the first place.

As it was, I accidentally stumbled upon the amazing benefits of living without refined sugar:

There was a noticeable change in my energy levels.  They evened out a lot.  Also I felt I was much less grumpy without sugar.

So that pretty much makes giving up sugar a 4 pointer right there!

1. Feels good.  Tick.
2. Good for me.  Tick.
3. Less grumpy is better for my children and my husband so : Good for others.  Tick.
4. More energy to give to the Greater good!  Tick.

Yet after each sustained sugar-free period of time, I returned to having sugar again full-swing.  And back in the full swings of fluctuating energy levels.  I really noticed how distracting it was to crave a sugar hit.  I didn’t seem to have tapered off with my sugar consumption at all.  Instead, I was just consuming a little more as if to make up for lost time –

7 months ago, I knew I wanted to harness the power of no sugar in my life…

But, I also reasoned, I didn’t want to be feel that things were forbidden.  Because this choice is part of my healthy lifestyle, not a “diet”.  And I wanted to show my kids that I choose my path, I’m not hemmed in by it.

So – daringly – I ate that Magnum.  I ate all of that dark Chocolate-covered vanilla ice-cream classic on a stick.  Slowly, I savoured the full sensations of the dessert.

A Bitter Sweet Experience:

After a month of no sugar, the first touches of the chocolate on my tongue were way too sweet and hard to handle as if the chemicals were immediately zipping to my brain.

I’ve read since that you get a feel-good surge of the feel-good chemicals seratonin and dopamine pretty rapidly when you ingest sugar.  And I’ve recently read some articles that say refined sugar may be more chemically addictive than cocaine.

The middle bit of the Magnum was ice-creamy and so I lingered, but because of taking it so slowly I really had time to consider the sensation of the experience…There was a slightly artificial tinge to it…In fact, it just did not taste that good to me any more.  Shock, horror!  A Magnum ice-cream used to be my favourite!

A Real Treat

I have actively chosen to avoid refined sugar since then.  6 whole months!  So I guess now I maybe should sort of revise the first line of this post where I wrote it had been 7 whole months.  (I’m not going to though.  Because I think of this triumphantly as a continuous journey of treating my body well and I’ll cut myself some slack in all of it.  So there.  Haha!)

My body’s doing a lot for me every day and I want to treat it well (and with grace). 

Or didn’t you realize that your body is a sacred place, the place of the Holy Spirit? Don’t you see that you can’t live however you please, squandering what God paid such a high price for? The physical part of you is not some piece of property belonging to the spiritual part of you. God owns the whole works. 1 Cor 6:19 (Message paraphrase)

I like the idea of thoughtfully looking after this sacred place of the Holy Spirit: my body.

And so, having looked for constructive benefits and found them lacking, lately I’ve been passing on the sugar…

“I have the right to do anything,” you say—but not everything is beneficial. “I have the right to do anything”—but not everything is constructive.” (1 Corinthians 10:23, NIV)

I’m not saying that this idea of not having sugar would be for everyone.  But I’m loving it!  So I may go on and on with it… And on and on about it, obviously!  Sorry about that… But anyway…

How could you live without chocolate for even a day?

Let alone sugar!

Am I Serious?

Perhaps you think, like I did, that giving up sugar is RATHER EXTREME BEHAVIOUR!

In the past, I too would have gasped at even the thought that giving up sugar was even possible. The me from the past has often closed my eyes while eating chocolate and allowing it to melt in my mouth. Mmmmm. At other times, I’ve actually attempted to stop the world around me in order that everyone should appreciate with me the serious divinity of a piece of cheesecake.

Giving up sugar for even just one day for me previously would have been a massive deal.

But now I can tell you how I can live without chocolate. Without refined sugar. If you really want to know. Because currently I do!

Inception

It started with an “Inception”; a glimpse of another world – just like in the movie of the same name:

Before I began with a fast from sugar, a thought had entered my brain. The thought was seeded at a dinner party – the table loaded with sugary food – where a friend of mine who had given up refined-sugar in a journey from illness to better health, told me she just starts on Monday and takes it a day at a time.

Why? Because she knows what’s good for her: like exercise or brushing her teeth.

And slowly that thought grew roots and branches in my brain.

So I give darling Julie the credit for the outrageous idea of my initial attempts at living without sugar. And the continuing journey was certainly made easier when I discovered that people all over are writing my new kind of recipes… Deliciously Ella and Madeleine Shaw and Hemsley & Hemsley are 3 of my faves.

Experimentation

Since that dinner party I have been slowly, by trial and error, been discovering a new refined-sugar-free world… then running away from it to the chocolate and the lemon drizzle cake…then running back to the dates and the prunes.

What is it like to live without refined sugar? Is it even possible? What will I use for ketchup? What about Easter and birthdays?

It’s weird, because I experiment with other foods, these questions have slowly been becoming less of an issue. I seek alternatives; such as baking with dates, or discovering that my wondrous Nutribullet can slowly turn a chopped frozen banana into “ice-cream”, or simply squishing a fresh tomato on top of something instead of using tomato ketchup or swirling a bit of honey or maple syrup here and there.

My media-savvy daughter reckons I should be posting my recipes here too, which would be funny because I’m a rather reluctant cook.  Although I cook from fresh most days to ensure the family eat healthily, when my husband cooks I often find his food tastes better to me. Maybe the lack of cooking required is one of the reasons I can so relate to the following idea:

Fresh fruit and veggies are naturally my favourite food anyway. That’s by divine design!

I read this idea in an Allen Carr book about eating once.  (His book on alcohol also changed my way of thinking for the better).

Allen Carr suggested that fruit and vegetables are naturally a human’s favourite foods – if we would only give our taste buds a chance to recalibrate!

He reckoned that we have actually been designed by God to mainly eat fruit and veges, nuts and seeds – because those are the foods that our bodies will naturally process.

Makes sense, right? Our senses tell us if those foods are fresh and good to eat and they don’t need refinining, processing or cooking for us.

Fruit and vegetables are our friends.

And without artificial and refined substances to alter our senses and mask the flavours, fruit and veggies really do taste so much sweeter. Isn’t it great and funny how our tastes can change according to what we habitually feed ourselves?  Now, after 7 months of healthier eating, I’d rather not muck up my tastebuds with an addictive, energy-shifting and insulin-spiking hit of sugar.

I’ll look at a dessert lately and see a Trick not a Treat!

All artificial flavour and colouring with a cherry on top, processed until there’s nothing there nutritionally. It’s even worse when you read through the long list of chemical ingredients on the back of many “foods” at the supermarket.

Getting our “Just Desserts” with great regularity is so easy and cheap. But just not the best case scenario, I’ve decided. In fact, the thought reminds me of a dessert cafe I went to a few times called “Death by Chocolate”. It’s one way to go, I guess!

Why do we do it ourselves?… To our children?…

“Ah, lovely kids. Give them a treat. “They deserve it”…!?”

Why do I do it to my children, seriously? Because I am so kind? I know that white, refined, addictive, sweet stuff is laced through so many edible food-like substances and I do care to read the label. And although I know it’s not the best thing for them…

I still occasionally pop sweeties into the children’s eager hands…

I do this! I do. What am I like!?

So that’s the confession: Though I don’t give sugar to myself lately, I have fed and continue to feed my kids sugar. Only sometimes now. Not every day as I did before. But still I let them have sugar.  Some of the chocolates I bought this morning will go to friends for sure – they should last for Christmas. But my children will be the recipients of at least a few of those treat-sized chocolates I bought this morning.

Because they want it. And they ask for it. And they’d think I was a total super-control-freak weirdo otherwise…? No.

Huh?…  I think can explain.

I figure if I made sugar taboo for them, that may give it more kudos in their eyes.

Instead, I’m trying to encourage my children to eat healthily by giving the example. By walking all this talk.

I want my children to become people who make their own healthy choices. I feel it’s better to show the way rather than force my will upon them when it comes to sugar.

I really hope it works and that our children will each grow up to look after themselves and make good and healthy choices. At least, some of their choices are signs of so far, so good…

I reason I have my own good role model for leading by example and giving the kids a choice: Jesus. He says “Follow me”. And then He walks on. We can choose to follow or not.

God gives us choices.

Unlike me, He doesn’t put the sweeties in our hands, but He does allow us to make good or bad choices. Have you noticed?

He does not force us into His Will – even though He knows what is good for us. Instead, He leads us by example and supports us by His grace.

I call that gracious. I call that loving. I call that freedom.

(Aha, so this is where my blog-post gets to bring Grace onto the plate again!)

God lets us look at everything available in the world for ourselves and make decisions about what we want and what we choose and what we need and hopefully what we believe is good for us. We are not programmed like computers to do the will of their master.

In our church, it’s put this way:

“Jesus is not about behaviour-modification, He’s about heart-transformation”.

When we choose to follow Him, we may not immediately see the instant external fix of our behaviour and circumstances that we are after, but by His grace, as we grow in our knowledge of Him, we change from the inside out.

God does not pre-program us to ensure we follow the rules, the laws. We have choice, for good or for bad. If we’d like it, we can choose to have a relationship with Jesus and be empowered by Grace. Jesus is all about grace and love, the heart and soul.

Thank God that He offers us His Grace. That which is truly best and beautiful and wonderful for us.  That’s why the Gospel of Jesus Christ is absolutely “The Good News”.

“Amazing Grace. How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.”

His gift of grace is truly sweet. No tricks.  It is good for us through and through.

 *Apart from that Magnum ice-cream at the end of month one.