In a fit of healthy inspiration, I've sworn off sugar for a month. I simply love sugar just a little more than I'm comfortable with, so for the sake of trying to loosen my addiction to it. No white death for a month, starting April 25th, 2010. The recent January/February Nutrition Action issue was pointing out the possible downsides of eating too much sugar, namely getting fat, increasing blood pressure, etc which I'll admit was a factor as well.

Parameters: Avoid Most of the Added Sugar

sugar-cookieCutting sugar out of my life entirely is going to be pretty much impossible as sugar is in everything. I'm aiming to limit myself to things that have 5g of sugar per serving. I'm not generally a label looker so I'm sure that I'll be making a lot judgement calls on the fly at time, but hey this is just an excercise and I'm pretty sure that I can see the sugar coming in at least 70% of the food that I eat and avoid it. Of course anything with natural sugar (hello fruit) is going to be fair game for eating.

Apparently, I'm not even close to the being the first person to give this a try. But this is this first time that I've ever tried to cut back my sugar intake.

Sweet Results

What am I expecting? If I felt significantly different I'd be a bit surprised. Mostly, I'm hoping to break the cravings that I have for sugar each morning, noon and night. It would be nice if I built up the self control to not eat the three jujubes left on the counter from the night before at 7:30 in the morning after I just finished breakfast. I would call that progress.

I'm also interested to see what happens when I'm forced by social situations to refrain from eating dessert or some other treat.
I'll keep you posted if I find anything else that is interesting in this experiment.