Over the last few months, I have managed to lose about 14 kilograms, which is no mean feat at age 49. Or at any age for that matter! My strategy, and it actually worked this time, has been to follow Dr Michael Moseley's 5:2 Diet Strategy, which involves five days a week eating what you normally would, and two days of calorie restriction to the tune of 500 calories a day for women, or 600 for men. It's not starvation, but sometimes it feels like it!
The other strategy which seemed to come to me naturally as I progressed through the first and toughest couple of weeks, was to drop as much sugar out of my diet as possible. This came about purely because on the days of severe caloric restriction, you couldn't do otherwise, unless you were happy to subsist on one iced doughnut for the entire day, and nothing else...
I preferred to spend my allowance on wholesome foods that gave me much more bang for my limited buck. So I'd start the day with Helga's soy and linseed bread which although calorie dense, also had some serious substance and helped keep me feeling satisfied longer. I'd top that with a slice of tasty cheese, just for a sense of normality, and then one or two coffees would accompany that. Now if I stuck to my usual 3 sugars in a coffee ritual, there would pretty much go my calories for the day. So I've managed to shave them down to one sugar each, and low fat milk. At first the restricted sugar made the coffees taste awful; now I am so used to it, I reckon I could almost do away with sugar entirely. Well, maybe!
So that breakfast would leave a couple of hundred calories for the remainder of the day, and that usually would end up being a cup a soup for lunch, and then a big leafy salad at dinner time with low fat dressing, and including some legumes for substance. All in all, about as sugar free as you can get, and very, very healthy. Especially compared to my previous diet of chocolate every day, the aforesaid 3 sugared full fat coffees, as well as lots of pasta and bread through the day.
The last couple of days, sugar seems to be sneaking its way back into my life in the form of a few small chocolate treats, biscuits, things like that. Suddenly I feel out of control again. And my mood is terrible. I've noted that my daughter's diet, which seems to consist of thickly coated Nutella toast for breakfast, heaps of sweet biscuits after school, and then whatever else we might have, such as chocolate, also affects her mood. At least I hope it's the sugar, because I can take some steps with that. I feel like she and I are fighting most of the time now (she's nearly 14!) and I am left wondering if it's purely the terrible teens, or if the sugar is wreaking some silent and sinister havoc on hers and my moods. Certainly I feel very short tempered with her lately, and I think I'm worse since I started imbibing the sweet stuff again. So I'm now on a mission to eliminate it as completely as possible, both from my diet, and severely restrict my daughter's intake as well. Stay tuned.
Sugar really is an unnecessary part of anyone's diet, and should be restricted to extremely small quantities, if at all. Empty calories, mood swings, nothing good comes from it, except that temporary spike of energy you get from it, followed closely by a whopping big downer where the only solution is to ... reach for more sugar.
Not this little black duck!
(to be continued)
