Buh-Bye Sugar!

I was absolutely wild this morning. I stepped on the scale and to my surprise I had lost seven pounds since Jan. 1. I knew I had a bit of weight to lose (clothes were tighter) but I never expected it to come off this quickly.

I was wild because I didn’t think I had been doing anything that significant to warrant it. I’m running a lot, but I’ve always worked out. In fact, I completed a 30-consecutive day workout streak in December and hadn’t lost a pound.

So what’s different, I wondered.

When it hit me -- the elimination of added sugar. Could Matt and I have really been consuming that much? He stepped on the scale on Monday and was down six pounds.

I guess we were.

I think most of you know of my love affair with Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Soy Latte.  I gave that up, so a calorie and sugar saver right there -- obvious.

Some, though, had not been so obvious, because when you really start looking for sugar, you find it in everything -- things we never even thought to check.

For example, Matt’s “PLAIN” soy yogurt -- lots of sugar. Our favorite tofu sushi roll we’d sometimes enjoy at Wegmans -- added sugar. Each of us had also been guilty of grabbing handfuls of Kashi cereal here and there as a snack. Once we began taking a hard look at sugar in ingredients, all of this had to go.

The other BIG guilty pleasure for us was bread. I make soup a lot during the winter. And every time I'd make it, I would also buy a loaf of Wegmans bakery organic multigrain baguette bread. Healthy, right? Not when you eat the whole thing in a day (a little bit as I cooked, a little bit when we ate and one, two, sometimes three walk by's after dinner -- we love our bread, I guess). Now if we want bread to accompany a meal, we turn to Ezekiel tortillas -- one each. (By the way, though one of the better breads from which to choose, the Wegmans multigrain baguette also has added sugar.)

Because neither of us was really 100 percent tuned in, our consumption of added sugar/processed food seemed little and insignificant. It obviously wasn’t.

Every bite we take matters.

How do we feel? More energetic than ever. We feel CLEAN! Our meals are still incredibly satisfying and we’re thriving fitness-wise. I also love that I’m thisclose to being comfortably back into that pair of pants I couldn’t get over my thighs on Thanksgiving morning.

The “moral” of today’s post?

Drastically reduce/eliminate added sugar and processed food. Start reading ingredients/nutritional info. Let THAT versus what the package promises determine what you put in your cart.


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