Why are we starting this site? Why are we at war against sugar? I believe that people want to get free, but nothing actually works long term. I believe that we've found a simple way to live free from the bondage of our food-centric society.
As we have been warring against sugar, I have been taking note of the excuses that I hear as to WHY people HAVE TO HAVE sugary things. Most of them sound like the excuses of addicts. Please don't get me wrong, I used to love and enjoy eating all things sweet! My favorite candies were Whoppers, Smarties, M&Ms and Black Licorice. Tim and I went through a season of our lives where we both drank a can of Coke every day! We loved pizza, homemade lasagne, bagels, donuts, waffles, pancakes, and french toast. I even made homemade syrup from pure sugar to go on our breakfast grain products and I’m a master cookie maker.
Fast forward from our old ways to our new ways, and I find that I control what’s in my house to eat, and we have housemates that do not eat our diet so there remains a bit of temptation. However, at work, now that’s the challenge! Two weeks ago I walked into our staff lounge first thing Monday morning to find a 3 layer cake with Oreo cookie frosting, to which I responded “They are trying to poison us again.” Then Tuesday, Costco muffins appear, followed by a staff meeting on Wednesday with giant chocolate chip cookies, 4” across and thick as your thumb, and a raffle of a box of them to boot! That’s the end for this week. The next week begins and when I check my mailbox, there is a love note telling me how much I’m loved and appreciated. Attached to the love note is a bag of Skittles, which promptly landed in the trash can. Every week staff members bake goodies to share, parents bring their baked goods and purchased goodies into the staff lounge to wait for the teachers to eat them up, and so it goes...
As a teacher, this is constant for the whole year! I have come to the point where I literally cannot eat sugar because my heart pounds and I get a migraine. So it is so easy to say “No!” To explain the extreme nature of my sugar reactions, I cannot even eat my favorite Pho because the rice noodles make my heart race! Eating out is so extremely limited now. I'm not complaining, its just easy to say no now.
Sugar is everywhere and it’s leaving so many people feeling trapped. Over and over so many of us try to change things and improve our life only to find that we have end up right back where we started. A vicious circle like a CD running on repeat. We cut calories, cut fat, work out like crazy for a period of time, but we haven’t slashed the sugars relentlessly. Until we remove the things pumping up glucose and requiring insulin to settle our blood sugars down, we won’t find the freedom we are longing for.
This is my WHY for wanting to create this place to share our life with you along with our food and health journey. It’s so easy to look at a photo of a person and think they don’t understand, so I’m placing a picture here of me in the midst of some of my most frustrated and discouraged years of following the dietary guidelines that were being laid out by the medical and health community.
As we have been warring against sugar, I have been taking note of the excuses that I hear as to WHY people HAVE TO HAVE sugary things. Most of them sound like the excuses of addicts. Please don't get me wrong, I used to love and enjoy eating all things sweet! My favorite candies were Whoppers, Smarties, M&Ms and Black Licorice. Tim and I went through a season of our lives where we both drank a can of Coke every day! We loved pizza, homemade lasagne, bagels, donuts, waffles, pancakes, and french toast. I even made homemade syrup from pure sugar to go on our breakfast grain products and I’m a master cookie maker.
Fast forward from our old ways to our new ways, and I find that I control what’s in my house to eat, and we have housemates that do not eat our diet so there remains a bit of temptation. However, at work, now that’s the challenge! Two weeks ago I walked into our staff lounge first thing Monday morning to find a 3 layer cake with Oreo cookie frosting, to which I responded “They are trying to poison us again.” Then Tuesday, Costco muffins appear, followed by a staff meeting on Wednesday with giant chocolate chip cookies, 4” across and thick as your thumb, and a raffle of a box of them to boot! That’s the end for this week. The next week begins and when I check my mailbox, there is a love note telling me how much I’m loved and appreciated. Attached to the love note is a bag of Skittles, which promptly landed in the trash can. Every week staff members bake goodies to share, parents bring their baked goods and purchased goodies into the staff lounge to wait for the teachers to eat them up, and so it goes...
As a teacher, this is constant for the whole year! I have come to the point where I literally cannot eat sugar because my heart pounds and I get a migraine. So it is so easy to say “No!” To explain the extreme nature of my sugar reactions, I cannot even eat my favorite Pho because the rice noodles make my heart race! Eating out is so extremely limited now. I'm not complaining, its just easy to say no now.
Sugar is everywhere and it’s leaving so many people feeling trapped. Over and over so many of us try to change things and improve our life only to find that we have end up right back where we started. A vicious circle like a CD running on repeat. We cut calories, cut fat, work out like crazy for a period of time, but we haven’t slashed the sugars relentlessly. Until we remove the things pumping up glucose and requiring insulin to settle our blood sugars down, we won’t find the freedom we are longing for.
This is my WHY for wanting to create this place to share our life with you along with our food and health journey. It’s so easy to look at a photo of a person and think they don’t understand, so I’m placing a picture here of me in the midst of some of my most frustrated and discouraged years of following the dietary guidelines that were being laid out by the medical and health community.