The More You Know...

I'm going to tell you this even though telling you is an admission of a pretty quick and rapid jump off the wagon of good intentions. I am eating sugar again, though not as much as before (i.e. I won't substitute a cookie for a MEAL. Must set a good example!) I have been for at least a week. And?

I've lost three pounds in about ten days, ever since I STOPPED worrying about what I was eating at all because my brain was so busy with all the stuff going on and all the stuff I needed to get done and remember and I just couldn't stand thinking about every bite I put in my mouth TOO.

Now, the goal of the sugar wean wasn't to lose weight, so it doesn't really mean all that much that I had very negligible, if any, weight loss while avoiding sugar, or that I have suddenly lost a few pounds since letting it into my body again. The real experiment was to see if I felt better after getting rid of sugar, and basically what I figured out was this: meh.

To elaborate on the meh: yes, by the end I think I was having fewer blood sugar spikes, so fewer ups and downs and feelings of total wipe out in the afternoon. But I also wasn't feeling GREAT and full of energy all the time, either, as many people had assured me I would. (Could be I didn't give it long enough to get to this point... Or could be that when one is getting up two or three or five times a night with kids, you're just never going to feel GREAT, regardless of what you are or are not eating.) Another issue is that I was eating ALL the TIME when I wasn't eating anything sweet because I was constantly looking for something to substitute for the sugar I was craving. I wasn't eating terrible things, but there were a heck of a lot of apples and cheese sticks and almonds and yogurts getting gobbled down throughout the day while I fidgeted and felt grumpy, wanting just one bite of chocolate. Again, my fault and probably something that would EVENTUALLY go away, but I was very tired of the feeling of constantly thinking about food.

One of my previous issues was that I couldn't seem to STOP nibbling on candy once I started- couldn't just have a bite and then be done. That problem does seem to have been somewhat helped by even a week or two off sugar. Now I have a few bites of chocolate and actually do feel satisfied, and kind of sick if I try to eat more. I seem to be enjoying chocolate and sweets the way a normal person would- as TREATS, not a staple of their diet. And I think I'm going to keep on eating treats at least once a day, because it gives me a lift and makes me feel happy and then I have some coffee and feel perky and go get some stuff done and stop thinking about how yicky I feel. And when I don't feel deprived (again, this is a MENTAL feeling of deprivation I'm talking about, not actual hunger) I'm much less inclined to roam around searching for further snacks later on.

So I guess I'm back off the bandwagon for now. I'm thinking of trying another sugar cleanse type diet after Jameson is sleeping through the night (so in another two years, I'm guessing! ha ha!) and see if I get different results when I'm regularly sleeping soundly and getting my REM cycles and all that. Because I did like not having the blood sugar dips and feeling more even keeled throughout the day. I just didn't like that my even-keel level seemed to be a low hum of moderate fatigue unsolved by coffee alone. Feeling only SLIGHTLY less tired, and then without any nice sugary pick me ups, didn't seem worth the effort.