Fasting 2017 - No Sugar, No Alcohol, No Meat

Green Smoothies are great for breakfast

For the last few years I have used lent, starting after carnival here in the Rhineland, to give up sugar for those few weeks. The reason was that I was getting the feeling that sugar had such a power over me that I couldn't resist it, whether it was in the form of chocolate, cake or ice-cream. I wanted to proof myself that I am stronger than sugar if I want to.
(You can read about my sugar-fasting experience 2016 here.) This year Mr. Schön decided to join and as he likes to do stuff extreme, sugar was not enough for him, he also wants to quit meat and give up alcohol and coffee as well. I agreed, as actually meat and alcohol is not so difficult for me and why not? Coffee is another story. I don't need it or miss it, but I actually think coffee is good for you, so I might drink have one once in a while.

The carrot cake we made for carnival. I just love cake!

Fasting seems to be a new thing. During the last weeks I have always had groups on facebook with people that supported each other through the sugarless times, which helped. But I asked my friends whether anyone else uses this - originally religiously motivated - time to quit some bad habits or foods. The response was quite overwhelming! A lot of people responded in that they quit alcohol for a few weeks, most people don't touch any sweets and one of them even has the plan not to buy anything that isn't really neccessary and to get rid of useless stuff in her apartment. That is actually a plan we have had for a while, as there is just so much junk in our flat. We own guitars no one plays anymore, lamps that we don't use, etc. Some of the stuff is great and could make somebody really happy. We will sell the stuff online and I vow to make a list about all the objects today.

Bye Bye cocktails. For now...

It has only been five days, but so far we have been really good. We are food-planning now and buy all the wonderful produce for the whole week. That way we spend much less money - no going out for dinner - and the motivation for cooking is much bigger, if you know what to cook and recipe and ingredients are already there in front of you.
We recently watched a tv documentary about how nutrition can be used to treat various conditions. From rheumatic problems to migraine they can improve the suffering by eating the right diet. I am convinced that "You are what you eat" is truer than many would admit, by eating the right food we can already improve our conditions so much.
This morning we used one of the shows recipes to make a cashew milk with cinnamon, which was really good and apparently helps improve high blood pressure and migraines both.

I will keep you posted about what we are eating, which recipes we recommend and how our sugar-, meat- and alcohol-free life progresses. At the moment I am still in this "high-time" where you just feel so good about yourself for doing it and imagining that your jeans get more loose everyday. But I know from the last two years that there will come a time when the fasting thing is less new and less sexy and I will crave sugary food. Next week I will have a fairly stressful week at work, so let's see how that goes...

Green Smoothies are also easier to get "to go" which is just awesome!

Delicious sugar-free Mousse au Chocolat

Being the sweet tooth that I am, I could not resist temptation and searched for sweet alternatives. Xylit seems to be one of the cheapest and healthiest alternatives to sugar, which is even good for your teeth. It tastes quite similar to sugar and doesn’t have a weird aftertaste like stevia. At amazon you can get 1 kg of xylit for 10 Euros. Compared to sugar that is a huge difference, but I would say it is worth it. Xylit is also called wood-sugar, as it is made out of tree barks. It has much less calories than industrial sugar and it does not rise your blood sugar levels. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylitol)

Last weekend we tried a recipe with xylit. It was also lactose-free, but instead of soycream we used regular cream. You can try it with soy cream, I bet it will still be delicious. Not being too fond of mousse au chocolat myself, I still know how much my better half enjoys it, which is why our first xylit-dessert came to be mousse au chocolat. We loved the coconut fat, and I found quite different opinions on it in the net. They all agree that coconut fat has lots of saturated fat, but there are hints that these saturated fats act differently from others… Hm. I can say it is delicious, as it adds some coconutty flavour to the mousse au chocolat, it was so tasty. The good thing about organic coconut fat, if it is really not good for you, we won’t have it often, as it is fairly pricy.

Try the recipe, I bet you will love it as much as we did:

4 eggs

100 g Xylit

60g coconut fat

70 g cocoa powder

300 ml cream (soy)

Attention: The mousse needs to cool in the fridge for a few hours in order to make it firm enough. We were pretty impatient and ate it after about an hour, which was great already.

Separate the eggs from the yolk, beat the yokes for a while and add Xylit and cocoa powder.

Beat the egg whites till they are stiff. Melt the coconut fat (microwave), add it to the cocoa-yolk-mass. Add the beaten egg whites carefully.

Whip the cream and add it to the rest. Put into the fridge for about 4 hours. Enjoy J

Dr. Lustig's approach on sugar

Reading can be such a joy. Knowing this for ages, one resolution of 2014 is to read more. I have always enjoyed reading a lot, but being a student of English and media science, it feels like all you have to do all day is read. For your studies. So reading for sheer pleasure while you had roughly 600 pages lying next to you that you SHOULD read, not fun. So I didn’t read much for myself during my studies.

Though working at university, I currently do not have as much to read for work (will change when I start my PhD. Big time…), plus I am spending roughly three hours every day sitting in a train. Purchasing books is one of my favourite leisure time activity, I own dozens of books, still waiting to be read. Having put roughly ten of them right next to the couch in the living room, I am reminded on a regular basis to take one of them with me whenever I leave the house, or just read when I am at home. I am enjoying it a lot and can only recommend it. As mentioned earlier “Fat chance” by Dr. Robert Lustig was one of the best reads I have had for a long time. It is pretty unbelievable how little I knew about our bodies and about nutrition, although it is such a large part of our life. (At the moment I am reading “Thinking fast and slow" by Daniel Kahnemann. Also new insights into everyday life. I will tell you more about it when I am finished, but I definitely recommend it.)

If you are interested in the fight against sugar and how exactly sugar works in your body, read “Fat Chance”. For those with limited time, I collected some of the most important facts:

-        a mantra used to be “A calorie is a calorie”, so if you use up as much as you take in you should be fine. Dr. Lustig makes clear: not every calorie is like the other

-        40% of normal weight Americans (so not only obese people) suffer from metabolic syndrome in some way [type 2 diabetes, lipid disorders, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, dementia]

-        Obesity is not the result of gluttony and sloth, but of a defect in energy deposition

-        Today, the obese outnumber the undernourished on the planet by 30 %

-        The body decides whether it uses your energy intake for storage or the business of living

-        Different calories are metabolized differently, the difference is: insulin

-        High blood sugar leads to a release of big amounts of insulin, which will store energy that is not used by the muscles and the brain in fat cells.

-        Subcutaneous fat is not the devil here, in fact it seems to be healthy to have some fat stored on your thighs, hips, arms, but the visceral fat makes you really ill. It is the fat surrounding your organs, which you cannot see, apart from the size of your belly. A lot of people have too much visceral fat and not only if they have a big belly. Even slender persons can have vast amounts of visceral fat, putting them as much at risk for diseases as someone who is obese.

-        I guess we all know, that our bodies are still programmed for droughts and ice age times, when food was scarce and who stored best got farthest

-        Sugar is as addictive as alcohol, the same part of your brain derives pleasure from it, which is why the food industry puts sugar into anything (ketchup, burgers, all kinds of processed food)

-        Your hunger is managed by a substance called leptin. Whenever the fat cells are full, and you have eaten, blood sugar is high, then there will be a lot of leptin in your blood, telling your brain that you had enough

-        Problem is: when you eat a lot and a lot of sugar that is, your insulin levels will rise high, as well as your leptin levels. After a while though, the cells will ignore both substances as they always exist in such abundance that your body suffers from a type of burn-out, it just gives up, resulting in insulin and leptin resistance.

-        Those resistances have a lot of horrible consequences, most interestingly, the body of an obese person releases the same signals as a starving one: the brain cannot see the leptin anymore, therefore it signalizes GET FOOD and DON’T WASTE ENERGY, SO DON’T MOVE. It is not only the sheer body mass of obese people that keep them from working out, ironically it is their brain, being afraid of starving.

-        Processed food is full of glucose, fructose, fats and proteins

-        Obesity is no result of behaviour, it is mainly the result of nutritional alterations of the last decades that drive insulin levels higher

-        Our bodies produce twice as much insulin as the bodies of people 30 years ago, even for the same amount of calories or glucose, which is one difference, the other: there is much more sugar and sweetener in our diet than 30 years ago

Factors and reasons

-        stress, little sleep -> biochemical response is to store more fat; sugar makes you happy and satisfied for a short amount of time

-        fructose (50% of refined sugar is fructose) activates pleasure centre in brain, but liver has a hard time to metabolize it -> liver fat -> metabolic syndrome

-        tans fats: increase shelf-life of products, mitochondria cannot digest them, they stay in your liver, your arteries, a.s.o. -> metabolic syndrome

-        omega 6 fatty acids: are essential, but too many lead to inflammatory compounds, intake of omega 6 acids (e.g. canola and corn oil and protein from animals fed by it (as most of them are today) has to equal omega 3 (e.g. in wild fish)

What to do to fix it?

You have to give your liver and your mitochondria a break. Insulin levels need to get down to fix the resistances.

Cooking fresh food containing

a) fiber

slows the rate at which body turns food into energy, therefore regulating blood sugar and insulin levels. Processed food lacks fiber to make it freezable and prolong shelf life. Fiber also activates leptin, tells your brain that you are full. [Dr. Lustig identifies not only softdrinks, but especially fruit juice as bad, as it is still considered healthy by a lot of people, containing as much sugar as coke and no fiber and therefore really dangerous.]

b) Omega 3 fatty acids

Anti-flammatory, wild fish and eggs from chicken fed with omega 3 fatty acids, flaxseed, linseed oil, walnut oil, a.s.o.

c) micronutrients

fruit and vegetables, especially wild ones, containing healthy micronutrients and antioxidants -> combat inflammation, keep cells intact and can protect you from cancer and Alzheimer

Eat real food, cook it yourself, when cooking or baking, take less sugar than in the recipe and experiment with healthier sugar alternatives, like stevia or xylose. Move -> movement refreshes the mitochondria and helps you to shrink your fat cells.

Read the book, it has helped me to see sugar differently and understand our bodies and our problems much better. 

The WHO puts us all on a sugar-diet!

I have the feeling that my obsession with sugar – on the one hand craving it and at the same time trying to find out how bad it really is for my body – follows a trend that will hit us hard in the next couple of years, maybe even already in the next months. Dr. Robert Lustig is quoted more and more throughout the media, new studies are being made and finally, one big change just occurred a few days ago:

The WHO changed its recommendation concerning sugar! This is huge, people. All those last forty years, when obesity became a problem in the US and politicians requested scientists to solve the problem, sugar has been ignored and fat has been blamed. Why?

This might sound a bit like a conspiracy-theory, but it is a plausible explanation: the sugar lobby is just too big. They pump a lot of money into the government, also into science, and it is no surprise that they saw the introduction of low-fat products as their chance to sell even more sugar and make people therefore more addicted to their products. This is exactly how it worked: fat was reduced in a lot of products, (low-fat yogurt, butter, cheese, there is even low fat lasagne, tiramisu, toffees, etc.) but as fat improves taste, you had to add sugar to compensate for the missing fat. This had two effects: 1^st the body does not feel as full as with the full-fat version, craves more in consequence and 2^nd the sugar triggers the reward centre of the brain and makes us want more. We can see the result on the streets in everyday life and on ourselves: we get fatter inspite of all the low-fat products. Scientists have criticised the food industry ever since. Check out this BBC documentary, it shows pretty accurately on how the whole process works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6nGlLUBkOQ

Jacques Peretti gives a very good overview on what the problem with our everyday diet is. Robert Lustig too is interviewed in this documentary. (Lustig’s lecture on youtube got commented by a girl from the US “He is fat himself and shouldn’t lecture us.” (paraphrasing) Obviously, she hasn’t seen the video. Lustig is not lecturing anyone and least the obese people themselves. Plus, he admits that he loves sugar just like anyone else. Which is the curse of sugar: knowing how bad it is, does not help.) Peretti says that the American government and the WHO are dependent on the sugar lobby and will only change their recommendations for sugar once the costs for obesity rise higher than the money gained by the sugar industry. Money rules the world… This apparently is the case now, as the WHO announced new guidelines on sugar only a few days ago, reducing the amount of recommended sugar intake dramatically from 10% to only 5% of your daily calorie intake.

“For an adult at a normal body mass index, or BMI, eating 5% would be around 25g of sugar – or six teaspoons. That’s less than is typically found in a single can of regular soda, which contains about 40 grams of sugar.” (http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/06/health/who-sugar-guidelines/) 

Things are about to change. And they have to, regarding the rising levels of obesity, the numbers of children suffering from type 2 diabetes and more and more people dying from metabolic syndrome. There are more people overweight than undernourished today, which seems like a joke.

How is my personal war on sugar going? Well, I have mentioned the fruit yogurt I couldn’t resist. Apart from that it is going pretty well. I learned that I should eat more regularly (which could also help me get rid of my migraine attacks.) and that it is much harder, to resist sweet food when I am stressed and everything seems to fall apart. But I managed and I am pretty optimistic of refraining from eating candy till Easter. Apparently though, sugar and especially chocolate is not a trigger for my migraine as I had more attacks already in March than I had in February. But that is a good thing, as I am only damaging my insulin- levels eating chocolate, not triggering any headaches. I also learnt that I cannot live without the taste of sweet food, not unless I move into a desert with no supermarkets and no fruit available.

So I eat plenty of fresh fruit but as Robert Lustig states the fiber from fresh fruit and veggies makes sugar much less dangerous, this is not really bad for you. Just leave away the juice and smoothies and eat the real thing. I also found a new love: sundried tomatoes. They are my candy now and I truly love them. So you can live without candy and it is not too hard, really. In the beginning of April I can donate blood again and I am pretty excited for the results of the blood test: will my no-sugar-diet have any affect on them? 

sugarfasting

I have to admit that I caved. In a way. I mean did not eat the list of candy I craved a few days before, including chocolate bars, cupcakes, cookies, cake, tiramisu, toffees, puddings and so on. But bought myself some yoghurt. with fruit in it. And they are almost as bad as candy, but I could not really help it. I suffer severely from PMS and yesterday was that time of month. I guess that yoghurt is kind of a compromise between the stuff I normally buy and the apples I should have gotten instead. Apart from the yoghurt I have also started to eat more fruit again. From time to time, as a treat, I feel like I have to eat something sweet and at least fruit also has a lot of fiber, so it is not as bad as candy.

Apart from that my 17 days of not eating sugar so far have not been a healthy affair at all. I feel like I compensate the lack of sugar with the help of more calories and more fat. I used to eat much healthier, less cheese, less flour, more veggies. But I can't seem to help it much. I read in Robert Lustig's book that often our brain replaces one product we crave with another, if one addiction cannot be satisfied. I am not addicted to bad food, but I cannot deny the satisfaction, salty or fatty food gives me at the moment.

Interestingly enough, shopping is not as horrible as I thought it might be. I got used to not pay the candy section of my stores any attention. (If it is not pms day). I will keep you updated on how the sugarfree time goes on.

Sweets for my sweet….

… sugar for my honey: Hello, my name is Selina and I am a sugar-addict. Yes, I confess. There is nothing as hard for me to resist as chocolate, ice-cream and Co. If I didn’t knew it was sabotaging my health I could live on sweets. Pudding, cake, you name it. Everything.

A part of me really likes the feeling to eat healthy food though, so I am interested in getting to know more about nutrition, which is how I found out about Dr. Robert Lustig. He is a medical doctor, a pediatrician with a focus on obesity. During his studies he found out how sugar, fat and obesity intermingle. I know that some aspects of his theory might be debatable, but actually critics have not really had a point when trying to confute him. A lecture he gave on the dangers of sugar is found on youtube, check it out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM

Last year, I was fed up with the power sugary food has over me and I abstained from sugar for about three weeks. (Until I found myself on the wedding of a friend with great dessert and cake, but that was ok, I only wanted to show myself, that I do not have to eat sugar on a regular basis.) For 2014 I thought lent would be a good timespan to once again let sugar go for a time. There are several reasons why fasting in lent makes sense: a) it is a defined timespan, so you know when you are about to be released; b) everyone knows about lent, so they won’t ask as many questions; c) you might shape your body a bit while fasting, good for better weather, plus d) I think living healthily in general is easier when the weather is good (maybe due to less stress symptoms).  

So I started on carnival, Monday before last. Sugarfree food also means, no sweet stuff, no xylit, or other sugar-substitutes, especially no artificial ones like aspartame (even more poisonous than sugar). I tried the strategy to let go of every sweet taste, in theory including even fruit. But I didn’t make it. The fruit-abstinence. So I still try to eat more veggies than fruit but once in a while I will eat a pear or a Kiwi. It works well, as the fruit now are like a special treat for me, substituting Snickers and KitKat.

Out of bad conscience I even googled how much sugar a Kiwi had. 9 grams. Quite a lot, I think. A banana 12 g, which I think is little, seeing how on a diet, fruit is ok, as long as it is not bananas or grapes. Well, I enjoyed it.

Unfortunately, craving does not get much better. I thought after a few days (12^th day now) it would improve, but whether it is the beautiful spring weather that makes me want to devour ice-cream and cake outside, or other reasons, I don’t know. Maybe it won’t get better. But I made it so far, like a fourth of the time, so I am pretty sure I will make it. But it is hard. Maria, from http://craftymaria.blogspot.de/ writes that she didn’t eat sugar in January and that she didn’t really mind. I have great respect for her. For me that seems to be impossible, I think about sugar a lot when I cannot have it.

If you are interested in the body-functions relating to sugar, please read “Fat Chance” by Robert Lustig. I am only half way through, but the insights the book gave me are priceless. I have the feeling that every page is like a bit of a revelation to me. Unfortunately the book cover looks like a diet-guidebook, which is why I am always a bit ashamed when I take it out in public. It is however full of scientific insights and highly political. Lustig detects several mechanisms in our body that can make us obese or also sabotage our health, even if we are of average shape. Insulin-resistance is the main problem, which will make sure that all you energy is stored into fat-cells. While insulin is high, when you are resistant, the leptin in your body, which will tell your brain when you are full and satisfied is blocked. Therefore, insulin-resistant people’s bodies will feel like starving bodies and react like them. They will make you eat as much as possible, mostly fatty and sugary food as they have a high energy-density, and make you move as little as possible (not to loose more energy). In addition to this, stress causes the production of cortisole, a hormone that causes even more energy-storage, saving up for a rainy day, if you will. Dr. Lustig’s approach is very medical and fact-driven, but I think it might be a good explanation why there are more diets and exercise-trends now than ever before, but at the same time more obese people than ever before.

It is definitely true for me that if I have a bad day and feel stressed out by something my craving for sugar gets worse and worse. Yesterday was bad. I had to stay at home because of my migraine and felt useless and hopeless. To tell you the truth I was an inch from calling the whole fasting off and indulging in loads and loads of sugary food. But I resisted. Cooled down and it worked. I was much better in the evening already.

There is a lot to loose besides honour: Mr. Schön offered me a deal: He would pay for vibram running shoes that I wanted to buy for my own, when lent is over, if I make it through the time. In case I don’t make it I would have to pay him back the money for the shoes, plus 500 Euro go to a party I hate like hell, e.g. the Nazi-party NPD. (I found this idea in the book “Drop dead healthy” by A.J. Jacobs, another great read.) Actually it is motivation enough not to give those dumbasses my precious money to keep fasting. Great idea, hm?

I will tell you how it will work out for me during those next 5 weeks. I already learned two things: it is important to keep yourself busy and to always eat enough not to be super-hungry.