June 24, 2015

Things I’m thinking about this week:

My new book (The Flavor Thesaurus).  So many new experiments. This book presents an opportunity to not just better understand the flavors that we consume daily, often with little thought, but also to experiment. Why just leave it to restaurant chefs? Surely some recipes will go wrong, but chefs make mistakes too.  My mother can attest to the trial and error of learning to cook that I put her through as a teenager. As a result, I can generally smell if a dish is seasoned enough, or is missing a little something. I look forward to the innumerable new challenges this book provides.

Posture
Okay, not food related, but still very important.

Daily Breakfast
Starting my day earlier with a sit down breakfast (and not the kind that happens in front of a computer screen) helps to organize my thoughts on the day ahead.  This also leads to lower stress level at work.

Spelt
I am definitely not the first one to discover it, but for me it’s a whole new way to think about bread/muffins/pizza etc.
Since I don’t have all the time in the world to spend in the kitchen, most other flour substitutes are not as attractive to me because you can only substitute a portion of the wheat flour and accomplish the desired result. This means extra math and room for error. Spelt doesn’t behave exactly like wheat, but it can be substituted 1:1 for flour and purchased in bulk affordably.
More nutritious…more on health here

My Month Without (Added) Sugar:

A couple of months back, I decided to cut additional sugar out of my diet for 30 days. I have a sweet tooth and likely always will, but it had begun to take more control of me than I deemed healthy. My boyfriend teamed up with me, for both for his own growth and solidarity. (He also gave up coffee for the month…)

The rules:

No added sugar in the form of processed sugar, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, maple syrup, brown rice syrup, honey (though a healthy source when used in moderation), or flavor syrups for coffee.
Regulate dried fruits, aka nature’s candy. Better than processed sugar, but not great.
No juice. (While not equal to added sugar, think about how much of the actual fruit you need to process to yield a typical cup of apple or orange juice. Would you ever eat that much in one sitting?)
No policing of fresh fruit intake, even for high sugar fruits. (Most often you’ll fill up before getting too much sugar anyways.)

Here are some sources of added sugar I found easy to cut out (logistically speaking – Have you ever stared longingly at a piece of cake or a glass of juice? That happened a lot):
oatmeal with raisins
yogurt (plain instead of flavored)
coffee
juice
candy (mainly the kind your office might provide and you tell yourself it’s fine to have just one…five times a day)
cake
ice cream / gelato

Some of the more difficult items:
salsa
cold cereal (even the “healthy” brands)
pasta sauce
granola/health bars
crackers
(most) store bought sliced bread
chicken sausage
Essentially any processed food. You name it, it probably has some added sugar.

The American Heart Association has more info here.

Learning to cope

My Monday-Friday breakfast had been thick cut rolled oats with raisins, cinnamon, a little butter, and vanilla extract…with 2-3 packets of Sugar in the Raw. First, I took away the sugar, and rather miserably got through the bowl of oatmeal (much like an unhappy child with a sour look on my face). Then came the extra butter and I am OK with added fat. Our bodies can handle that relatively well, particularly when it’s as straightforward as butter, at the very least compared with sugar. I admit to currently adding 1 tablespoon of butter, but feeling so much better later on than I did with the extra sugar. I also try mixing in different fruits like blueberries and raspberries to keep it interesting. (If you like oatmeal and wonder why you don’t stay full, make sure to avoid instant oatmeal packets. It is more filling and cost effective to buy rolled oats in bulk, and add your own extras like berries and nuts.)

For the first couple weeks or so, I still got annoying sugar cravings. By the last week, I would see something sweet, think about how delicious it might be, but consciously acknowledge that it wouldn’t make me feel great, and walk away, without feeling like I was missing something.

Saying “No thank you.” to sweets at events, and feeling the need to explain (because my friends know how much I love sweet things), but also not wanting to preach on health. I decided to do this for me, and I have since returned to eating the occasional doughnut, cake, candy, etc, but only so far as I’ll actually enjoy it and feel good throughout the day.

Do you think food shopping is difficult when you’re hungry? Try it when you can’t eat most of the delicious beautifully packaged goods on the shelves. I strategized, and only went to the fresh produce, dairy, and frozen aisles (frozen fruits in smoothies are a good work-around when you can’t have juice), because walking down the snack aisle hungry for dinner just after leaving work was not fun.

This process involved re-wiring my brain and changing expectations. At the time, I was reading the book, The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do in life and business, by Charles Duhigg, which offered some great insights and inspired me to do this no added sugar month in the first place. Firstly, a bad habit follows a regular cue (e.g., a sweet craving). That cue may not ever go away, but the goal is replace the old habit with a new one. The cue for the old habit will always be there, which is why gamblers and alcoholics will always be recovering, not recovered. I had to add in a new habit, but first I really strove to figure out why I wanted the sugar in the first place.

If I couldn’t answer this question, I would only feel like this was a month of punishment, and would return to my former habits in the end. Was it because my blood sugar was low?…Unlikely, and even so, processed sugar would only add to my fatigue. Was it due to negative stress and the short burst of sweet flavor that made me feel better(find alt word), even for a short while? Was it because I hadn’t slept properly the previous night? It was often mix of these. In order to quiet that little voice advising me to have a cup of juice or a sweet snack, I would get up and walk around, drink water, or have an apple or banana. A surprising consequence: I was moving more. Some of the cravings were really an urge for distraction from the work I had been doing, or the need to move around. Both the sugar and the moving around improve my mood, but the latter has a longer lasting effect. The new habit here was eating something healthy or moving around. I have also noticed that I snack far less on the weekends, since I’m under less negative stress. Finding times to let my mind wander or take a short walk outside prevents many of the cravings.

Unintended effects:
I developed better discipline in other areas, not necessarily because the lower sugar diet made me feel better, but because I had started asking myself questions about why I do the little things that lead to lower productivity, or keep me up late at night when I should be sleeping, or lead me to procrastinate, things that had come to be habit, but which I didn’t need to do.

I still love sweets, and that’s not really a problem, nor is it my fault. Humans and many other animals evolved without constant access to sugar and we’re wired to feel rewarded when we get cake or cookies and the like. The difference between the start and finish of the month is my ability to actively control the previously habitual responses to both positive and negative stimuli, and ultimately understand more about myself in each small decision.

After finishing the month, I still eat processed food, but am much more keen to check the label for how much added sugar is contained within. Some is negligible, but if you eat a lot of processed foods, that can still add up. My sugar consumption varies, but the effect of too much sugar (more than the AHA recommended amount) is significantly more noticeable, and de-incentivizes me from repeating that behavior too often.

“All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits – practical, emotional, and intellectual – systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.”

– William James

You may or may not agree with the above quote, highlighted in The Power of Habit, but give it some consideration. It doesn’t mean that everything must be micromanaged all the time, or that we are powerless in the face of our daily habitual decisions. For me, it means that we have more power over our daily lives than we typically exert and that it’s worth taking a closer look at the why, not just the what.