Yesterday I wrote about why we might want to get the sugar out. Today, I offer some tips on the how.
1. Taper. Sugar is addictive. We may find that we have headaches or we might be irritable as we cut down the sugar on our way to cutting it out. Some of us can deal with cold turkey, but others of us might want to be a bit more gradual about it. Maybe we start by making breakfast a sugar-free meal, or we cut out that after-dinner ice cream before we move on to more aggressive measures.
2. Cook from scratch. As I mentioned yesterday, almost all prepared foods have sugar hiding in them. Making our own salad dressing can be easy and fun and cheap. We can simmer our own spaghetti sauce. Slow cooker oatmeal is better for us and cheaper than instant, sugary packets.
3. Make the non-sugary beverage a treat. Put a slice of lemon in the fizzy water. How about some mint in that pitcher of water in the fridge? Beware the fruit juice, though, because it has a lot more concentrated sugar than whole fruits.
4. Cheat, but carefully. This will require some experimentation. Some of us can manage a weekly dessert without falling headlong into the candy aisle, while others can’t. Some of us can have a bite of our kid’s or partner’s or parent’s sweet thing without needing to get our own. Maybe we can deal with a teaspoon of sugar in the morning tea, but anything more flips us into total sugar indulgence.
5. Eat the fruit. In general, the sugar that occurs naturally in food tends to be a reasonable amount. When sugar accompanies the fiber, vitamins, and minerals in actual whole fruits, we get some nutritional bang for our caloric buck. It is okay to enjoy food and eating. What we want to do is eat a variety of foods. So please do not take this as license to eat all watermelon all the time.
We can do this.
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