No Sugar-November Challenge!

I mean, is this extreme? lol

November is pretty much the month for sugar. We are typically swimming in leftover halloween candy, Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and (for me) half of my family has a November birthday.

High Tide Tribe, I'm doing this challange just as much for me as I am doing it for you! The first step to recovery is to acknowledge you have a problem...

Hi, I'm Brittany and I'm addicted to sugar.

There I said it.

First step completed.

The hardest part about removing sugar from your diet isn't even the avoidance of the obvious choices of sugar like cakes and candy. The hardest part is the hidden sugar! It's in everything!! So picture this...It's the day you start your new diet. You have your whole day planned out. For breakfast, you have a cup of black coffee and eat a small yogurt. As you head off to work, you put a granola bar in your purse for later and you have that for a snack mid day. It's lunch time and you've made a delicious salad and included your favorite salad dressing. As your day goes on you plan your meal for dinner tonight. You are watching your carbs, so you prepare a meal with "pasta-less" pasta... a large plate of spagetti squash with your favorite pasta sauce.

Sounds healthy, right?

You had a heaping searving of sugar at every meal!

The median sugar amount for your organic yogurt is around 13.1 grams of sugar!

The granola bar you had for a snack most likely contained between 10-15 grams of sugar.

The salad dressing, on average, contains around 2.6 grams of sugar per tbsp. I don't know about you, but I most definetly use more that one tbsp on my salad.

The pasta sauce for dinner contains between 8-10 grams per half cup of sauce.

It's really not the obvious sugar choices that get us. Those are the easy ones to avoid. It's the day to day "healthy" choices we don't even think to consider and the hidden sugars that go by a different name. I'll break it down easy for you below to help you get started and to stay on track.

First, some things to look out for:

Sugar has many different names. Here are a few: Dextros, fructose, galactose, lactose, maltose, and sucrose.

These are some basic names to spot on the back of a label. But also, beware of sugars like agave, high fructose corn syrup, beet sugar, fruit juice, ethyl maltol, maltodextrin, dextran,and any other obvious names that actually include the word sugar.

Although fruit naturally contains sugar, there really isn't much reason to avoid naturally occuring sugars in WHOLE FOODS (unless your doctor says to avoid or you know that your body doesn't tolorate it). When you eat it in its whole food state, your body metabolizes it slowly and avoids insulin spikes. We are mostly talking about added sugars in your diet.