That's how much I get to have, per day. You know how much sugar that is? It's one yogurt and one truffle. It's two large bananas. Roughly 55 M&Ms. In short, it's the easiest thing in the world to accidentally surpass. How did it come to this? Well...
I've been counting calories for about three weeks now. While my weight has fluctuated some, it's stayed about even. This is despite making my calorie goals, and getting exercise 3-5 days a week. In short, things aren't going well. So I asked my doctor about what else I could be doing. She recommended 5 days/week of exercise, even really light exercise. But she also recommended limiting my sugar to 30 grams per day.
As it turns out, this is absurdly difficult.
I'm now weighing food based on how much sugar it has per serving, rather than calories. It turns out that if you mainly focus on sugar, you end up having to avoid a lot of calorie-intensive stuff anyway. Y'know, like any kind of candy, most chips, and even some "healthy" foods. I've sent the last of the Halloween candy to work with Chris, where its sugary deliciousness can be distributed across lots of people rather than going to my thighs.
One of the doctor's recommendations was that I start replacing my breakfast with a protein shake. She gave me a handout. In the most basic of formats, the recipe is: plant-based protein powder (like hemp, pea, or rice), fiber (flax seeds, spinach, kale), fruit (berries, banana, etc), and liquid (almond milk, water, rice milk, etc). Blend, and you have yourself a pretty healthy breakfast on the go. She has two example recipes. The first was okay, after I got the recipe right. (Details are on Twitter and Instagram)
The second... made the morning horrifying. It was a kale-based smoothie, which I probably should have known better than to try. But more tellingly, it lacked any sweetener whatsoever. Avocado is not sweet. Healthy, maybe, but not sweet. The cocoa powder (unsweetened) and almond extract could not hide the foul slap of kale. Worse, the entire thing looked like green sludge.
I couldn't make myself drink more than 5 swallows of it. I was an immensely picky eater as a child. As an adult, I've learned to just shove stuff into my mouth, chew it, and swallow it while trying not to pay attention to it. I got pretty good at that, and use that tactic to this day every time I go to someone's house and they serve something I know I don't like. I couldn't manage it with this smoothie. It was that awful.
In a fit of desperation, I doctored the unholy green sludge with a whole banana, adding a ton of sugar (albeit fructose, a natural sugar) to the mix. It was still about the worst thing ever. So finally, determined not to waste all the time I'd spent putting together the ingredients, measuring out and adding those ingredients to my food tracker, and the money spent buying those ingredients.... I chugged the horrific substance (20 ounces' worth, in the end). I then waited to see if my stomach was going to reject the unholy green sludge, because my taste buds were firmly advocating for the immediate ejection of anything that tasted that hideous.
It's been about 7 hours, so I guess my stomach has decided to keep the unholy green sludge. It's extremely healthy unholy green sludge, which is another reason I downed it rather than exiling it to the garbage disposal.
Now if only my taste buds would forget this ever happened... I tried placating them with a chunk of (humane) steak, then a truffle from my birthday present, then (sugarless) snack crackers, but apparently the whole experience was sufficiently traumatic that even that and seven hours can't make the memory of the taste go away.
Needless to say, I'm going back to the first recipe, with the too much fructose-sugar, tomorrow. I'll figure out how to get rid of the rest of the kale and the remaining avocado, somehow. I'm going to try doing half kale, half spinach for tomorrow's smoothie. If that's completely horrible, I may end up screwing up my eyes and eating the kale raw. (Let's hope it doesn't come to that. One traumatic experience is enough for the week, right?)
I've been counting calories for about three weeks now. While my weight has fluctuated some, it's stayed about even. This is despite making my calorie goals, and getting exercise 3-5 days a week. In short, things aren't going well. So I asked my doctor about what else I could be doing. She recommended 5 days/week of exercise, even really light exercise. But she also recommended limiting my sugar to 30 grams per day.
As it turns out, this is absurdly difficult.
I'm now weighing food based on how much sugar it has per serving, rather than calories. It turns out that if you mainly focus on sugar, you end up having to avoid a lot of calorie-intensive stuff anyway. Y'know, like any kind of candy, most chips, and even some "healthy" foods. I've sent the last of the Halloween candy to work with Chris, where its sugary deliciousness can be distributed across lots of people rather than going to my thighs.
One of the doctor's recommendations was that I start replacing my breakfast with a protein shake. She gave me a handout. In the most basic of formats, the recipe is: plant-based protein powder (like hemp, pea, or rice), fiber (flax seeds, spinach, kale), fruit (berries, banana, etc), and liquid (almond milk, water, rice milk, etc). Blend, and you have yourself a pretty healthy breakfast on the go. She has two example recipes. The first was okay, after I got the recipe right. (Details are on Twitter and Instagram)
The second... made the morning horrifying. It was a kale-based smoothie, which I probably should have known better than to try. But more tellingly, it lacked any sweetener whatsoever. Avocado is not sweet. Healthy, maybe, but not sweet. The cocoa powder (unsweetened) and almond extract could not hide the foul slap of kale. Worse, the entire thing looked like green sludge.
I couldn't make myself drink more than 5 swallows of it. I was an immensely picky eater as a child. As an adult, I've learned to just shove stuff into my mouth, chew it, and swallow it while trying not to pay attention to it. I got pretty good at that, and use that tactic to this day every time I go to someone's house and they serve something I know I don't like. I couldn't manage it with this smoothie. It was that awful.
In a fit of desperation, I doctored the unholy green sludge with a whole banana, adding a ton of sugar (albeit fructose, a natural sugar) to the mix. It was still about the worst thing ever. So finally, determined not to waste all the time I'd spent putting together the ingredients, measuring out and adding those ingredients to my food tracker, and the money spent buying those ingredients.... I chugged the horrific substance (20 ounces' worth, in the end). I then waited to see if my stomach was going to reject the unholy green sludge, because my taste buds were firmly advocating for the immediate ejection of anything that tasted that hideous.
It's been about 7 hours, so I guess my stomach has decided to keep the unholy green sludge. It's extremely healthy unholy green sludge, which is another reason I downed it rather than exiling it to the garbage disposal.
Now if only my taste buds would forget this ever happened... I tried placating them with a chunk of (humane) steak, then a truffle from my birthday present, then (sugarless) snack crackers, but apparently the whole experience was sufficiently traumatic that even that and seven hours can't make the memory of the taste go away.
Needless to say, I'm going back to the first recipe, with the too much fructose-sugar, tomorrow. I'll figure out how to get rid of the rest of the kale and the remaining avocado, somehow. I'm going to try doing half kale, half spinach for tomorrow's smoothie. If that's completely horrible, I may end up screwing up my eyes and eating the kale raw. (Let's hope it doesn't come to that. One traumatic experience is enough for the week, right?)
No comments:
Post a Comment