No Sugar Experiment – Days 24 – 31? Plus… the Rules

Okay, we are at the end of our month of (pretty much) going without added sugars. For it being our first time ever and having started it without a lot of forethought or planning we think we did pretty good overall. We didn’t really do this with a specific goal of losing weight, but it does appear that I lost five pounds. There were minor little exceptions now and then: a bowl of Crispix here, a King’s Hawaiian roll there, etc. Neither of us seemed to have very strong cravings for sugary things. I’ll admit to minor cravings on occasion, but nothing I couldn’t handle. My typical way of handling such things is to tell myself, “I will treat myself to that… later.”

But part of what we are trying to do at Mexican Paradox is to be one voice for societal change that gets sugars out of food where it really shouldn’t be. When you get enough real food and whole food and food with high nutritional value your cravings for sugary things automatically goes down, and then it becomes less a matter of exercising will power.

Here’s a pic of some unsweetened cereal I tried for the first time during our no-sugar experiment:

The Rules

Well, we got to the end of this month without having told what the rules for our experiment even were. So, without further ado the rules we established for this particular go-around were:

  • No added sugars; naturally occurring sugar was okay and up to 1 gram added sugar was okay in limited instances
  • Some natural sweeteners were okay, such as monkfruit, but no agave or maple syrup, at least this time around
  • Near the beginning of the experiment we did finish off a few perishable things we had in our kitchen that had some added sugar to them, but none were gross violators
  • Up to ~2 tablespoons of honey per day were allowed
  • One piece of dark chocolate a day was allowed

Personally, I didn’t even have dark chocolate everyday. When I did it was only That’s it brand Dark Chocolate Fig Truffles that Jannette had picked up from Costco recently:

And even when I did have some it was only one piece, two on a couple occasions, rather than the 5-piece serving size the packaging mentions.

So… overall the experiment wasn’t too hard. We’d informally been trying to cut down on sugar before this anyways, and that likely helped. But while we knew that added sugar was all over the place, we did keep getting constantly surprised with more and more evidence of that.