I have tried doing this a few times but always ended up stumped and eventually gave up. It’s difficult to find processed foods (e.g. yogurt, cereal, peanut butter) without sugar and so easy to mistakenly get foods with sugar on accident. Baked goods of almost all kinds have sugar by necessity, so they’re generally out. This doesn’t even account for the natural sugars in fruits and the like.
How committed are you to no sugar and how have you addressed all that? I’d love to try again with some better strategies.
> I’d love to try again with some better strategies.
In my case I have found it helpful to not quit sugar cold turkey, but gradually. First I stopped buying and using refined sugar at all (putting it in coffee, yogurt, etc.) This is quite easy. Then, avoid buying products whose ingredient list starts with sugar, like marmalade, "milk" chocolate, cereals and the like. This is a bit harder since it requires to pay attention to most products you buy, but still quite feasible. Then, once I was used to spot sugar at the beginning of the ingredient list, I began to read the whole list of ingredients, and avoid products that contained any sugar at all. For example: pre-cut carrots with lemon and ciboulette? whole wheat bread loafs? what on earth can be healthier than those things? Yet both of them contain sugar, in all the brands that I checked!
I started this "program" about three years ago and now I feel slightly healthier, nothing spectacular, but still. The thing is that now I notice immediately when something is too sugary. To the point of it being disgusting. For example, I have real trouble finishing a piece of cake in a birthday party (after fighting my urge to be a jerk about it and refuse it altogether).
I was only able to do this by also doing intermittent fasting. I replaced sugar with some more blood sugar friendly substitutes like stevia and some erythritol. (I like to go light on this stuff though)
I eat very low carb compared to most Americans. (Not keto just low carb)
Why are we treating all sugars as the same? They are not the same.
Some baked goods have sugar in order to feed yeast, rather than humans... Pizza dough, bagels, croissants. Yes these all come in dessert varieties, but it's not the default option.
Especially when you start getting to dumping on fresh fruit, it's like, no, please don't commit yourself to a bland beige life like that! Plants are masters of poisons and trickery, e.g. capsaicin (what makes peppers spicy) makes our mouths burn, but not the mouths of birds—who spread their seeds. Plants use fructose specifically because it's not dextrose and therefore it's hard for bacteria to digest: because they want us to eat this fruit and scatter the pit. Indeed they make the fruit sweet rather rapidly, “now now, it's ready now!”, to signal an optimal “it’s not poisonous! now you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours” moment to us.
Plants even look out for our longer-term health, those bright colors that we find so attractive are usually signaling to us these really important antioxidants that we need. As long as we don't freeze or puree the cell walls into oblivion, the resulting fiber traps some sugars and feeds it not to us but to our gut bacteria, who then don't starve and eat our GI linings...
“let's not eat foods that I know are healthy, to satisfy arbitrary rules I made up to keep myself healthy”... really?
So if zero tolerance is out, what remains?
• Set a low sugar target, “no more than 10% of my calories from sugars.”
• Prefer stuff with a shelf life. If it has an expiration date rather than a nutrition label, great!
• Don't worry about the natural sugar in yogurt, the lactose, unless you're lactose-intolerant. But don't buy the flavored versions as they are sugary enough to classify as desserts for breakfast. Instead do what the Dutch do—buy the plain stuff and cut the sour yourself with added whole grains and fresh fruit.
• “Don't even let it in your house” the other stuff. Guilty pleasures for me include chocolate and jam, I try to make sure that I don't have these in-stock...
• The grocer is a pilgrimage. What I mean is, it's tempting to zigzag your way through and see everything, and this is also why shopping takes forever! But pilgrims usually make a big walk around a structure before diving into the middle for a brief flirtation/unveiling of divinity. A good grocery run too walks around the aisles at the edges, fresh fruit and veg, fresh baked goods, meat and poultry, dairy... And it makes targeted trips into the middle only for things that it needs. You've got a list of the things you'll dip into the middle for, after all, and if your grocery trips are short then if you miss something, you can take another short grocery trip later in the week and still save time and money. Small batch sizes, lean manufacturing!
