I always start my day bright and early with a gym workout starting at 5:30am – however, due to the amount of sugar I ate the day before I didn’t fall asleep till almost 2am! Don’t judge – I had to get that stuff out of my house somehow and I don’t believe in wasting food! This put a major kink in my beauty rest and caused me to not go to the gym after all – not a good way to start the day. I also count my calories and get all of my food ready for the entire day in the morning; I've done this for years and am always aware of the calorie content, but besides that I usually don’t pay attention to any other numbers on the Nutrition Facts. Now I need to make sure I consume no more than 21g of refined sugars each day (with the ultimate goal of not consuming refined sugars at all). It’s amazing how hard it will be to continue to eat even the healthy options I’m used to; after looking at the amount of sugar in them they aren’t that healthy after all L.
Breakfast consisted of whole grain oatmeal with walnuts and strawberries – total of 2 g of sugar. I normally would have included dried cranberries, but to my surprise they have 28g of sugar in them!!!! And I usually put brown sugar in my oatmeal as well, but 1 tablespoon has 12 grams of sugar and that is just too many this early in the day! Had I had a bowl of strawberries with some oatmeal it would have tasted better, but I got through it.
Mid morning snack: Banana
Lunch was a chicken sandwich on low-fat whole wheat bread with lettuce and low fat mayo, trisciuts and a Dr. Pepper 10 – total sugar count 5g. Not too shabby and the Dr. Pepper has done the trick for now and tamed the sweet craving I usually get right after lunch.
Afternoon snack consisted of two clementines – normally I would have had a granola bar with these but I didn’t want to add too many sugar grams to my earlier count so I drank more water and forced myself not to think about it. Surprisingly about 20 minutes later my sugar craving had passed. But about an hour later I was completely ravenous so for dinner I ended up eating chicken breast and a whole entire bag of frozen green beans (3g of sugar total), which only left me satisfied for about 2 hours. My evening snack would have consisted of a yogurt but my organic greek yogurt has a whopping 22 g of sugar in it! So I decided to just have a bowl of cereal but my organic granola cereal has 16g of sugar in it! After reading all the labels on the multitude of cereal boxes in our house (we REALLY like cereal) I was pleasantly surprised to see that Tyler’s box of Honey Bunches of Oats only has 6g of sugar in it! That coupled with ½ cup of low fat milk and blueberries made my evening snack a total of 12g of sugar – more in one sitting than I wanted but better than what I would have normally reached for.
So my daily total of refined sugar consumed was 22g – which is 1 more than what we should consume in a day however I usually consume over 100 g of sugar everyday so I consider this BIG! I did go to bed feeling hungry, but not overwhelmed by sugar cravings – this could be due to the fact that I didn’t eat a ton of sugar throughout the day or it could be the initial drive and determination you get when you start something new. Right now I’m highly motivated, in another week my motivation will probably be tested. Overall, I’m very pleased with my first day – hoping day 2 is just as good.
And the best part – because I was so cognoscente of my sugar grams I ultimately made better choices and shaved 400 calories off of my normal daily caloric intake!
Good Job baby!
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