My Banishing Sugar Journey

I Cheated! I Admit It!

The hidden candy was just hiding there, waiting for me to find it.

I cheated. I admit it. And no, it wasn’t even the Valentine’s candy that did me in.

I was a good girl and didn’t buy a single piece of Valentine’s candy this year. For me. Now, granted, I’d already bought the candy for the boxes to send to my grandkids, and some for my dad’s birthday which is February 13th. So I easily steered clear of the candy aisles that I had to pass four days a week to get to my greeting cards area to work.

Which leads me to another thought. One I won’t discuss here but will be future food for thought for me. Here I am trying to avoid added sugars, reading about how much damage excess sugar does to our bodies…but…here Grandma is every holiday buying bags and bags of candy to send to the grandkids.

Don’t I want my grandkids to be healthy too? Isn’t their long-term health just as important to me as mine is? Shhhh! Don’t tell the grandkids, but I think Grandma is going to have to rethink her holiday boxes. I have until Easter to come up with an alternative plan. I have a feeling from here on out they’re going to be getting books, coloring books, games, and other miscellaneous goodies in their Easter baskets and Christmas stockings instead of candy.

But back to what I learned with my breaking down and eating four small pieces of candy.

It was after dinner, when that demon sugar craving was hitting big time. I rummaged around in my snack drawer in my desk — the one that hardly has anything left in it anymore! There were a few packages of pecans, dried blueberries and banana chips. As I shifted the bags around, not quite knowing what I wanted to nibble on, I spied it!

A small portion of a bag of leftover Halloween candy.

Caramel apple flavor!

Now, I can already hear many of you saying — Why didn’t you just THROW THEM AWAY???

And I hear the other half of you cheering, yelling out — HOORAY!

But I am my mother’s child. I’ve been trained well. You do NOT throw good food away!

Okay — the issue about whether this qualifies as ‘good food’ is also under debate. And I will admit that if I found an unopened can of sauerkraut in the pantry, I could easily throw that away without any qualms whatsoever.

But candy?? One of my favorites?

I checked the nutrition facts. Four pieces of candy is 24 grams of added sugars.

Yes, that’s a lot.

But then I looked at what I’d eaten throughout the day.

In the morning I’d had a cup of cottage cheese, with a tablespoon of apple butter syrup. 5 grams of sugar.

For lunch I had a chicken sandwich. 10 grams of added sugar.

For dinner I had a Lean Cuisine meal. 4 grams of sugar.

No additional snacks throughout the day.

Total for the day was 19 grams of sugar. Well under the (what I thought was) maximum amount of 35 grams.

I decided that I’d been a ‘good girl’ for the day and would treat myself. I set out 4 pieces of candy. I ate two right then and laid 2 pieces on my keyboard to eat later.

Those four pieces (24 grams) with the sugar I’d already had (19 grams) would be 43 grams for the day. A little more than the 35 grams maximum. But that was still about a third of the sugar of what I had been eating every day. So, I was comfortable with exceeding the maximum amount by a little bit since I’d been so good for almost two weeks.

Except…you know how that ‘later’ part goes.

It tasted sooooooooo good after being close to two weeks with consuming very little added sugars. So those two ‘for later’ pieces found their way to my mouth too.

I kept working on the story I was writing, and WHOA…..about twenty minutes later started feeling WEIRD! Not a caffeine rush like I’d get when I had too many Diet Cokes in a day. But I felt lightheaded and definitely ‘wonky’. Not bad enough to call 911 or do anything drastic response, but just very strange.

As I sat there, trying to assess what was going on, I looked at my list again and realized that I hadn’t calculated the green tea I’d had earlier — with a tablespoon of honey — another 17 grams!

Adding that 17 grams to my 43, that now put me at 60 grams for the day.

Then I went to doublecheck the maximum recommended amounts.

The recommended maximum for MEN is 36 grams. For WOMEN — — it’s 25 grams! That’s a lot lower than the 35 grams I thought I was working off of.

Fortunately, my sugar rush subsided fairly quickly. Within another 15–20 minutes I was back to feeling ‘normal’.

The few remaining candies in the bag did end up in the trash can after this.

But in a way, I’m glad that I ‘cheated’ and had this response.

Before if I had eaten 4 candies — 24 grams — my body wouldn’t have even flinched. Heck, most likely I could have eaten 8 or 12 candies and not had a visible blip in my body’s response. With what I had been consuming, easily 100–150 grams a day, a mere 24 grams of sugar wouldn’t have even phased me.

But now, after just two weeks without hardly any additional sugars, 24 grams threw me into sugar rush symptoms, even if only for a brief time.

Which proves to me that my body is adapting to ‘this new normal’ and that I am adjusting to a life with far less sugar. That is a positive reinforcement for me. I can do this.

I will admit that Monday afternoon when I left the store, with my bananas and kitty crunchies, I was craving some of those soft chocolate chip cookies from the bakery something fierce. I wanted one so bad. But I reined in that craving and bought a bag of huge, juicy green grapes instead.

I foresee a lot more grapes in my future.

But no more Brach’s Caramel Apple candies!

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