I honestly never thought I’d say this, but here it is: I dig green smoothies.
The thought of having a thick milkshake-like-but-not-quite-milkshake-like tasting liquid in the morning substituting as ‘breakfast’ simply seemed absurd to me.

I, the müsli-eating, cheese and liverwurst-loving, bread-devouring breakfast-enthusiast, really had a hard time with the idea of only having a ‘drink’ instead.

I know. I know! I take it all back! I am not afraid to admit that I was wrong. So wrong!

Since the sugar detox, I’ve basically had a smoothie at least every other day. First I did it because it was ‘suggested’ through the class and hey, who am I to dismiss good, well-intended suggestions? You can’t learn anything new if you don’t try. Well, I tried and I am really starting to like green smoothies in the morning. It’s fast and easy and I am having my breakfast on the lightrail (another healthy habit I am trying to get back into) on my way to work. It really works out all around!

I’ve been using Nicole‘s ultimate green smoothie formula. It’s printed out, laminated and pinned to my kitchen wall, so I always have it handy when I need it even though my current favorite I can already make without glancing at the list! I have been playing around with different ingredients (many more combinations to try though!) and this here my current favorite:

1 cup strawberries
1 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk
1 handful spinach
1 tbsp almond butter
1/2 tbsp chia seeds
dash of cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract

I added a half banana the other day, but I decided to not do this again. Bananas are smell and taste suckers, you guys! All I could taste was banana (and I am not really that big of a fan of bananas!). Maybe I’ll try it in combination with some other ingredients again in the future, but with this one, I want to taste the strawberries!

So, here is where you come in now (fellow detoxers or not): are you into smoothies? What ingredients do you like? What combination is your current favorite? I’d love to exchange different recipes with you guys so I can find smoothies that have been pre-approved, so to speak.

PS. I am not commenting on the smug faces and inappropriate yummy noises that Nicole mentioned in her blog post. You see for yourself.

PPS. I still like a solid-food based breakfast on the weekends though. Don’t take that away from me!

So, here we are… at the end of June and I am about to complete the 30-day Sugar detox course, including an actual 5-day sugar detox. No sugar (or very, very little natural sugar) for five days. It seems like a short period of time. 5 days. One can easily go without fruit and bread and any sweet treats for 5 days. No problem.

The thing is though: fruit and bread¹ are a huge part of my diet, so what the heck was I going to eat? Honestly, before you freak out, there is plenty of other foods to eat and I didn’t really have a big problem coming up with meals for the 5 days. In fact, I really enjoyed the challenge to really meal plan around this. It definitely made me think about my food choices much more.

A few observations in regards to the detox phase itself:

I am not a snacker. You know how some people plan out 6 mini-meals throughout their day (and call the even-numbered meals ” snacks”)? Yeah, I don’t do that. I am usually perfectly fine with three square meals a day. It doesn’t mean that I don’t sometimes eat something between my main meals, but I don’t have a schedule for that or a regular habit. Most days, I am perfectly fine with just breakfast, lunch and dinner.

The strongest feeling of this sugar withdrawal was a feeling of “emptiness” in my stomach. I would eat delicious, plentiful meals with vegetables and salad and meat – things that I’ve been eating on a regular basis before, mind you – but it just wouldn’t satisfy me for very long. As I said, I am usually not much of a snacker throughout the day, but during the detox phase, I needed the snacks. Like, I was literally waiting for snack time to come around.

My Dad (an athlete and P.E. teacher) explained that my body was working harder to get the energy (without the simple carbohyrates) from the food that I was supplying and therefore was asking “more” from my body. I think that makes sense.

I am very much a creature of habit. Having a smoothie in the morning instead of something solid for breakfast? Yummy, but difficult. I felt like I had a drink for breakfast (or two, if you count the coffee) and now where’s my croissant or roll? The same was true for dinner… I had delicious salads, vegetables and small pieces of meat, but something seemed to be missing if there was no ‘starchy’ side dish on my plate as well. Meals seemed to be so much more limited (or should I say that even though I think of my diet as pretty versatile, I realized how very much confined it still really is and that there are many more vegetables and grains that I could incorporate into my meal planning).

I need bread. Excuse me, whole grain bread (which was actually detox approved, but I cut it out during the 5 days anyway, just to see how it would make me feel to go without it. As I mentioned, this was not a diet, but more of an experiment around food.). In order to NOT eat snacks throughout the day, I need something that fills me. Boy, did I crave a fresh slice of whole grain bread the whole freakin’ time. Physically, I didn’t really feel a huge impact during the 5 days of detox. I didn’t really have any of the potential physical symptoms… shakes, headache, nausea, exhaustion. However, I do think I had an emotional reaction to less sugar. Maybe even edginess, because I just didn’t feel full for very long. Whole grain bread, however, does that for me.

I think about food. A lot. This sounds more dramatic that it is. I just realized how much time I spend thinking about food, grocery shopping, meal planning, new recipes that I want to give a go, restaurants I like to try out. As I mentioned in my initial blog post about this detox: everything that is related to our emotions somewhat revolves around food in one way or another and I don’t want to call myself a ‘foodie’, but maybe I am. I enjoy food. I enjoy learning about food, shopping for food, preparing food, and eating food. Yes, when it comes down to it, it’s only fuel for our body, but heck, if we need it, why not also enjoy it, right?

A few general take-aways:

Natural sugar is good. Added sugar is bad. If there is sugar in the ingredient list that means this sugar is not naturally in the food you’re consuming and you should limit that amount of sugar in your diet. The same applies to refined sugar that you add to your coffee, that you use for baking or sprinkle on your oatmeal.

Learn to read food labels. No, really. It’s not very hard and it tells you so much about what you consume. Yes, it requires a little bit of research and planning, but the smart choices that you make at the supermarket will not come to haunt you later. I actually got a friend (or two) jump on the bandwagon of more “conscious” food choices and they didn’t even want to hear about my sugar detox ;)

I am a moderator (vs. an abstainer). I actually already knew that going into the detox, but it got confirmed again. I can enjoy certain foods (sweet treats, alcohol) in moderation and feel satisfied by the occasional indulgence. I’ve always lived by the motto “everything in moderation”. I rather have one piece of chocolate than no chocolate at all. I acknowledge that this doesn’t work for everybody.

Meal planning works! I used to think not very highly of meal planning until a few months ago when I finally gave it a go, because I thought “but what if I don’t feel like eating whatever I had planned for a certain day?” The truth is: meal planning doesn’t have to mean that you plan a specific meal for every day of the week. It can be as flexible as you want it to be. You stock up on some staple foods that you really like and then plan meals around these staples to throw together whatever you feel like on a particular day. I am a huge advocate for small grocery shopping trips throughout the week, instead of buying a shitload of stuff in advance (unless you can freeze it easily). Bonus: if you meal plan, you will always have healthy food at home and don’t have excuses to run out and get take out so often. Think about it!

Support is important! Whatever changes you make to your diet, people react in the weirdest ways sometimes. Obviously, you’re only making changes for yourself (whatever your reasons might be) and it is good to know that there are people who support you. Find those people who make you feel smug as fuck for sticking with something that is important to you! Those are the people you want to keep around.

I’m not sure what the conclusion is other than: I learned a shit-ton about food and what I want to put in my body and Nicole did a hell of a job with this course!
The detox phase itself was definitely an experiment that I’d like to repeat in the future. My physical and emotional symptoms to the detox were minimal and I think that either a) (added) sugar didn’t play a huge role in my diet to begin with, b) my body/stomach is just not overly sensitive to sugar and handles it well (when my sister was pregnant with her first child and developed gestational diabetes, I poked myself with one of her needles once and checked my blood sugar. Even after a meal, I had a normal value.), or c) I didn’t journal long enough to really observe any subtle changes in the way I felt after certain foods (which could totally be the case, therefore, I am planning to continue to monitor my food intake and experiment some more in July).

I have many more things to say about this experience, but this is already pretty long, so I’ll end this here. I am planning to share more thoughts and some recipes in future blog posts.

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¹ The bread in the picture is imported from Germany (where else?) and available at our local co-op. Ingredients list is short (organic whole rye, water, organic flaxseeds, yeast, salt). That’s it. And it’s filling and so satisfying. You should try it. (Trader Joe’s has a similar whole grain bread available, although the ingredient list is a bit more complex.)

12 days into the Sugar Detox and I already have so many thoughts… which… I will share at a later date. Today, I want to talk about bread.  If you know me a little bit, then you know that bread is very dear to my heart. If I had to choose one thing to eat for the rest of my life, it would be bread.

While I do enjoy a fresh slice of sourdough or some sweet Challah, my real love is dark, grainy bread. J calls it “brick”, because it’s dense, heavy and usually comes in brick-shape. My Mom has been baking whole grain bread since I was a kid and I love her recipe, but I have a hard time finding cracked rye and wheat (point me into the right direction if you know where to get that! Actually, I just googled it and found it on Amazon, but there must be a local store that sells it, right?) to replicate the bread.
My Mom’s recipe calls for yeast, sugar beet syrup (for sweetening and color) and buttermilk in the recipe, besides cracked rye, cracked wheat and wheat flour. It is a pretty healthy recipe to begin with.

I’ve really been enjoying the conversations in our Facebook group about things we eat on a regular basis, things we crave and things we can easily do without. Like I said, I can’t do without bread, so you can imagine my excitement when I came across the link that Laura posted for  recipe for the “The Life Changing Loaf of Bread“. When I saw the picture, I knew I had to try this no-yeast, no-flour bread that looks so much like my Mom’s whole grain bread, but even healthier.

When I looked through the ingredient list, I was excited about the sunflower seeds and the flax seeds and the rolled oats, because yeah, I like grains and seeds. This is going to be delicious! Then I stumbled over an ingredient that I didn’t know and had to ask my English-German dictionary what the hell psyllium seed husks were. And then my eyes widened… because, wait, isn’t this something you need when you have problems going to the bathroom? And I am supposed to put this in my bread?

Yes indeed. That’s exactly what it is. A laxative. And also a perfect binding agent to hold all the grains and seeds together.

So what? This bread is going to have healthy digestive side effects! It could be a hell of a lot worse, I guess. Healthy bread and good poop – double win, right? Right.

So, I ventured to the local Co-op last Saturday with an ingredient list.

The instructions for this bread sounded easy enough: mix all the dry ingredients in your (preferably silicon) loaf pan. Whisk together the ‘wet’ ingredients, pour into the loaf pan, mix very well and let soak for at least two hours before baking. Done.

My silicon loaf pan turned out to be a little bit on the big side for the amount of ingredients, so my loaf measured only about an inch in height, but I didn’t mind it actually. The slices are perfect fingerfood-size and I had one just with butter as soon as the loaf had cooled down. The bread tasted wonderful… rich, hearty, nutty. Just how I like it.

Last night, I made a very easy dinner (I actually love just having bread for dinner!) and topped a couple of slices with light cream cheese, grape tomatoes, salt, pepper, and fresh basil. The bread is really filling and will definitely also make a nice light lunch substitute. I haven’t tried to toast it yet, but I could imagine it would taste wonderful with sliced cheese or some jam.

While this post has nothing to do with sugar per se,  I like the idea of eating and baking with whole grain ingredients and very little added sweetness.  I’ll be on the lookout for more whole grain recipes and healthier versions of bread and baked goods. My New Roots, where this bread recipe was originally posted, will be a good source for sure.