What I’ve learned
I am still upset about this one — apparently the lunch meat we’ve been buying has sugar added to it! (Pictured above.) Please tell me why in God’s name my lunch meat needs sugar?!?! I don’t understand. Luckily, Trader Joe’s sells Applegate turkey, which has no sugar and also a lot less of the other crap too. I might need to keep buying it, just because I’m going to be angry about this for awhile.
But no seriously, mostly what I’ve taken away and what’s been interesting is to watch what happens when I have a craving for something sweet (which is often, it seems). Because I can’t just mindlessly grab a piece of chocolate or candy from the snack closet at work, I end up actually thinking about why I want something. Am I bored? Likely. Am I actually hungry? Sometimes. Am I thirsty? A good bet. If I can’t shake the craving, I’ll eat a handful of blueberries or a clementine (yay fruit!). If I actually am hungry or feel like I need some energy, I’ll eat a spoonful of peanut butter or a handful of granola. But most of the time it turns out that my water bottle is empty and I’ll go fill it and go distract myself. It’s amazing to me that one seemingly simple change has suddenly turned me into this very mindful person. This is definitely something that I want to take with me even after January is over.
What’s been hardest
The first few days after lunch and dinner (and sometimes breakfast!) I really, really wanted something sweet. Well actually, no, it was just a habit. I had to stop myself from walking over to the pantry and grabbing a piece of chocolate just because it was what I was used to. But since then, that habit seems to have been slowly dissipating. I did decide to allow myself a small amount of dark chocolate, but during the first week I tried not to eat very much. I had a bite last night for the first time in several days (!) and it was so delicious!
The other hard thing, as predicted, was alcohol. But not for the reasons I expected! I did a good job ahead of time planning on what drinks I could have that didn’t contain added sugar. But I’ve ended up corroborating the results of this study, which has ironically been floating around recently. It found that people who had “low calorie” mixers in their drinks (or nothing mixed with their alcohol, in my case) got drunker faster and for longer time. So that’s great… not.
We also went to Marc’s company holiday party over the weekend and I had several very large glasses of wine, which my stomach definitely was not a fan of. I had originally put wine on my “allowed” list, but after sitting with a hurting stomach for a day and thinking about all the sugar that is in wine, I think I’m going to avoid it for the remainder of the month.
0 Comments