Saturday, July 11, 2009

Giving Up Sugar and Refined Flour, Progress Report 2

I'm now three weeks into my diet experiment, and have continued the trend of losing one pound per week. I've never actually been on a real "diet" in my life (i.e. a diet to lose weight), since my problem has always been too little weight and not too much. But I can confidently assert that a low-carb diet works for weight loss! It's quite amazing.

Collin gets back from his trip on Monday, and since I will then be cooking his normal portions of carb-laden foods, I imagine that I'll end up eating more carbs again. If I cook it, I will eat it. I understand that much about myself.

One thing I learned in the past three weeks is that sugar-cravings very quickly disappear. Well, maybe not disappear completely, but at least drastically recede. It took less than a week before I could finish a meal and not immediately crave a sweet dessert. That's far quicker than I ever would have guessed.

Not to say that I've beaten my sugar addiction. This hasn't been about abstinence. And in the past week I've been more lax than I was in the first two weeks. I made homemade ginger ale (a 3-liter bottle!) and then there was the small matter of the Thin Mint Girl Scout cookies that were given to me (hey, I lasted three whole days before I even cracked the first sleeve...and when food is a gift, it would be totally inconsiderate to let it go to waste).

But I've been pretty good about flour consumption and whole grains. I've been eating brown rice in my stir-frys and baking whole-grain breads. The only straight-up refined flour I ate this past week was my spinach pasta--two servings that I made into pierogies in order to use up some leftover mashed potatoes (I had needed those to go in a pumpernickel bread recipe).

What I've learned: I could quite easily learn to go without added sugar, and I could adapt quite well to eating mostly whole-grains. I'll continue to shift my diet in that direction, but it'll probably be a slow process. But that's okay. At least now I know I can do it.

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