our new normal

I thought I'd better post a 6 months on update in our low fructose experiment. It really is our new normal.

Our shopping habits are established.

We know what we prefer when we eat out - I must admit we haven't attempted Thai food - it seems the one thing which might just be too hard.

Giggi asks for a ham and cheese sandwich or a green apple if he's hungry (not a biscuit, cake, chocolate etc.)

I've become an expert at home ice cream making.

My cake of choice if we're having visitors or if I need to bring something elsewhere is David Gillespie's butter cake with a handful or two of frozen blueberries.

I might eat too many croissants...

I'm not sure what else I have to report. I'll get back to you in another 6 months or so... But I can't see us ever going back.

three months on - still good

Well it's the beginning of a new month which means another month on our low-fructose adventure. At this stage I'm not sure what to write. I'm not sure what the fuss is about. I don't miss all the sugar laden treats. This really has become our new normal. 

In the interests of full disclosure I did enjoy a Windsor Hotel high tea - it's a Melbourne institution. At the kind  invitation of my sister-in-law's future in-laws we had a lovely sunday lunch in town. There were small hot pies and pastries, sandwiches and scones on the three tiered stands and a buffet of sweet treats. You can see a beautiful selection below. It was a lovely one off and didn't upset the apple-cart. 

I think I can handle a once a month treat (quality not quantity, see here) - so much better than a daily or more often treat. Now this really is a treat.

The other thing that I really noticed is when we put some tomato sauce on a sausage roll. If I'd been more organised (see here) we wouldn't have succumbed to our old ways. But it was seriously sweet. I used to think tomato sauce was savoury. Now it almost tastes as though it belongs on ice cream...

I'm starting to wonder what we're going to do about easter chocolate. I think I might put the word out that if you'd like to buy something for our kids choose a gift that has more to do with easter (i.e. remembering Jesus's saving death and resurrection) or otherwise something dark chocolate - the darker the better.

I'm thinking about making our own easter eggs. I'm not sure that a block of 85% Green and Black's will cut it. There's a recipe here that looks like it has potential or I could melt said Green and Blacks. And I can pick up some easter egg moulds pretty easily I would have thought. Maybe here (although 1/2 a kilo of chocolate per egg might be a bit much) or somewhere like spotlight. 

Any thoughts???

some low-fructose life savers

I thought I would mention some products that have been real life savers for us over the last 2 and a bit months as we've quit sugar. I'd love to make everything from scratch and one day when I can justify a thermomix I might just do that but in the mean time here are a couple of yummy products which are low sugar particularly for their category.

Dips: Most are very high in sugar. We stick to this yumi one or otherwise the basil and pine nut ones are usually ok too.

Sauce: BBQ sauce is over 50g sugar/ 100g food. Most tomato sauces are around 20g sugar/ 100g food. This pasta sauce, however, is around 3g sugar/100g food and while it takes a bit of getting used to, if you have a sauce addict in the family it's not too bad on a sausage roll, as a pizza sauce or even a pasta sauce :-). Thanks to my sister-in-law for this recommendation.

Chocolate: I know this chocolate at 14g of sugar/100g of food doesn't quite fit in to the schedule but if you just eat one square it's 0.5g of sugar, which isn't too hard to fit into a low-fructose diet (less than 24g of sugar per day). Plus it is yummy! Love the madagascan vanilla... mmmmm. And it's certified fairtrade and organic so you can feel good about that too :-)

Breakfast Cereals: It's very hard to find a cereal with out honey, dried fruit, out and out sugar etc. So you pretty much need to stick to weet-bix or rolled oats without all the additives. We prefer weet-bix or toast.

Spreads: Here's another difficult one. Jam, honey and nutella are out. If you're Australian you're in luck as you can have Vegemite (Marmite and Promite however are high in sugar. There's also quite a variation in the amounts of sugar in peanut butters. This one without added salt or sugar is our favourite. It comes in at 5g sugar/100g of food.

 

two months on - I finally get it

We are now 2 months into our low fructose journey. I've loved the whole process but I feel like in the last week I finally get it.

I hardly snack any more. I eat less at meal times. I don't know what the fuss is about, having pretty much no interest in lollies, cakes, ice cream etc. Weird. I even have quite yummy low fructose choc mint ice cream (made with real mint) in the freezer and I'm not really interested.

We had a cake on Monday night for my stepmother-in-law's 60th birthday. BTW I made David Gillespie's Coconut Meringue Cake (from the Sweet Poison Quit Plan) - really good, even got the thumbs up from the rest. And I realised this is the first piece of cake I've had since I made one for new years eve. 30 days later. Unheard of.

In other news my 4yo has started eating 85% cocoa chocolate. He quite enjoys it. Even his tastes must be changing. (We've been a bit more gentle with him, I'm still formulating my approach to children and fructose, I hope to post about it soon). A couple of weeks ago he wasn't interested. I think 85% chocolate has been the one thing that we eat outside the 4g sugar/100g of food guideline. I haven't changed my habit of wanting something to eat with my cup of coffee. But now I'm completely satisfied with half a square of chocolate (5 whole grams of chocolate, less than one gram of sugar). Rather than 1 or 2 or 3 chocolate biscuits...

We've got a few strawberry plants (5 or 6 I think) and we finally have some fruit but you know one or at the maximum two are ripe at the same time. So it's lovely my son can pick a strawberry every day or so. I kind of think that this is what our fruit consumption ought to be like. Seasonal. A bit sparse. No gorging. But delicious.

Surprise, surprise another outcome has been my hypoglycaemia is more under control even with less snacking. No plunging blood sugar levels has been fantastic.

Well it really has taken this long to rid our systems of so many of the negative effects of fructose. But we feel fantastic and it's something we really hope to continue for the rest of our lives. Something that really helped was Sarah Wilson's 8 week I Quit Sugar plan. And I think 8 weeks is a good span of time to really feel the benefits. It's a pretty quick but comprehensive way to start this journey (I'd pick up a copy of David Gillespie's Sweet Poison Quit Plan as well). So I've decided to be an affiliate. If you'd like to get a copy of Sarah's e-book just click through from my sidebar and I'll benefit from your brilliant decision :-) You can also join in with a whole community who are up to week 5 of their quitting sugar journey.

a misnomer if ever I saw one

sweet poison sweet poison sweet poison

this is so negligent as to be almost criminal

an adventure in fructose

After having been off the sweet stuff for 7 weeks or so I was intrigued to see what would happen when we went out for a degustation menu for my sister-in-law's birthday. It's the first meal we haven't been in control of for all that time. Anyway, I was interested to see how far we've come.

We ate at Matteo's. The food was beautiful. It included a lot of asian fusion dishes. Our favourites were the kingfisher sashimi and the tea smoked duck. Fortunately no one item was too substantial but there was a fair few fructose laden ingredients in the savoury courses (watermelon, hoisin sauce, plum relish etc). 

The big kicker was the dessert of course. Apart from a minimal amount of ice cream and cake that I've made we haven't really indulged in much dessert the last 2 months. And certainly no fructose laden desserts. So I was a little nervous about the dessert course. Here's what was on the menu:

Sorry mood lighting made photography difficult, but et voila, the dessert:

Well it was delicious and more so because we don't eat this food all the time. It really was a treat. I loved the ice cream (it reminded me a little of Maggie Beer's burnt fig jam, honeycomb and caramel ice cream) and the berry tartlet was beautiful too. The most interesting thing was that I just could not eat the chocolate ganache. IT WAS TOO SWEET. I guess white chocolate was always going to be a shock after eating 100% cocoa chocolate. But I don't think I've ever turned dessert away for being too sweet.

The other issue I was concerned about was that I'd be starving the next day or have huge sweet cravings. But everything was completely normal. Now I don't think this means that I could do this more often. But it was nice to know that on a really one off special occasion I could cope. 

frustration with food misinformation

Fairfax media has been running a number of diet related articles with the new year and resolutions and all that. This one however really got to me. All about why diets don't work and what the solution is. So Nick Galvin looks at some of the stats and the evidence: that people spend a lot on weight-loss and most people can't keep the weight they do lose off.

This sentence is just chilling. "In fact, one of the authors of a study published in the American Psychologist journal in 2007 went so far as to call dieting 'a consistent predictor of future weight gain'."

The physiological factors that prevent weight-loss were interesting: that the level of hormones in dieters changes rapidly making them MORE hungry than ever and that their metabolism slowed. So your body is doing everything it can to go back to the way things were. No wonder it feels like an uphill battle.

What was SO frustrating was that the journalist then went on to look at a case study of a guy who lost 40 kilos in a year by doing A LOT of exercise and by basically eating low fat proteins and steamed vegetables. But he assures us that he's not on a diet.... but that's another issue. Then the journalist lists a couple of recommendations from the Mayo clinic about kilojoules in and kilojoules out etc. But the journalist does not show how either the case study or the Mayo recommendations answer the problems raised at the outset.

This is what I love about The Sweet Poison Quit Plan and other fructose-free approaches to life is that they deal with the issues raised by the article. Because you increase your fat intake to begin with you are LESS hungry and your metabolism doesn't slow. I know this whole thing is a radical shift in mindset but how can the journalist not see that he's not being consistent!?!?!?!

one month on - still fructose free

Well we survived the holiday period largely fructose-free. I think the Easter egg craziness might be the only time of year that is harder but we haven't felt deprived at all.

I meant to say earlier but I followed through and got rid of all our pantry and fridge items which didn't fall inside the 4g of sugar/100g of food guideline. It helped that we were moving and I didn't want to pack things I wasn't planning on using any longer anyway. We have moved in with my mother-in-law but fortunately she doesn't like a lot of sweet food anyway so it shouldn't be too hard.

We have started eating a bit more fruit. You can eat 1-2 pieces of fruit a day on the plan, so we're not going overboard. And we're trying to stick to the recommended fruit such as berries, kiwi, pears and citrus.

The other good thing is that with a good supply of dextrose we have started making sweet treats which pass the low fructose test. In particular we've tried a few recipes from the Sweet Poison Quit Plan. So far I've whipped up some ice cream, a butter cake and some vanilla egg custard. Yummo. I can also recommend the frozen mango yogurt from Jamie Oliver's 30 Minute Meals, just substitute glucose syrup for the honey - although you'd probably go through your day's allowance of fruit in one go.

We have also enjoyed a fair few croissants - our new bakery treat of choice. Now just to make sure that it remains a sometimes food.

Giggi's 'artistic' fuzzy shot of a friend and I at Max Brenner's. Fortunately my husband was on the ball and ordered our coffees and croissants without the molten chocolate slathered all over them.

I'm surprised that 3 cafes we've visited in the last 10 days have supplied a small sweet treat gratis with the coffee. But I've been even more surprised by how well Giggi has coped with me turning them down. I think it's great that we've started this journey while we still have quite a bit of control over what he eats. Hopefully it will make it easier when he has more freedom in this area. Perhaps he won't have the taste for it and certainly he'll understand more of why we're doing what we're doing.

Which is:
    1) have healthy weights
    2) go back to normal appetites not subverted by fructose
    3) the prevention or mitigation of diseases such as diabetes, hyperglycemia, high cholesterol etc.

Happy New Year to you all. Here's to a happy and healthy 2012. Let me know if you're planning on joining us on this fructose-free but fulfilling ride.

adventures in fructose-free treats: chocolate

As promised we decided to do a bit of a taste test to see which chocolate we enjoy most. So far I had tracked down the 99% Lindt and the 100% Dominican from Koko Black. My sister-in-law had found a 99% at the Kirribilli chocolate shop. And we thought that last of all we'd compare it to the 85% Lindt which is something more in the realm of normalcy. It probably wasn't according to normal protocols but we were cleansing our palates with coffee.

I wish I'd read about chocolate tasting notes before we began because we were struggling for adjectives, seriously in need of direction and suggestion. I think I'm still suffering a loss of adjectives since being pregnant twice, or maybe it's the lack of sleep???

Here's what we think:

It was unanimous that the 99% Lindt was our least favourite. It was strange because the flavour took a long time to hit your palate and when it did it was quite dull and bitter. It wasn't very creamy at all, just marginally better than eating cocoa powder and is weirdly crystalline in parts. However, did go brilliantly grated over chocolate ice cream, see here. My friend Caro thought it was 'gaggable'.

We then moved on to the 100% Dominican from Koko Black. This was significantly better. It had a stronger flavour and was creamier than the Lindt. You could still describe it as pungent but it has a much more interesting taste than the Lindt. It was my favourite.

Then we moved on to the handmade 99% cocoa chocolate from Coco Chocolate in Kirribilli. It was creamier again. But I think it had some kind of distinctive 'green' flavour. I wasn't able to put my finger on it. Apparently it makes a heady accompaniment to whiskey... And is suitable for vegans but not for the faint hearted. This was the favourite of both my husband and my sister-in-law.

I'm not convinced about the 85% it still has 14% sugar which is half a sugar cube per square of chocolate which seems rather a lot. It did seem very sweet and the squares are too big.

I meant to take a photo at the end because it was funny how much chocolate we had left over. Not the norm where chocolate is usually involved but perfect for our purposes.

adventures in fructose-free treats: icecream

It's been great hanging out with some others on this fructose-free journey and picking up their tips and tricks. The main message for me is that it seems to be more difficult the second time, so best to stick with the program. The other thing is that croissants make excellent sugar free treats (as long as you don't buy those ones from the supermarket that you stick in the oven - it has to be the super buttery flaky ones... I think I can hack it).

In the spirit of the boxing day sales we picked up an ice cream maker. I wasn't sure which one to get since Choice hasn't done a review (and seeing as it makes their top 20 of least used, most re-gifted gifts, I'm not sure they're going to do a review any time soon). So, we just waltzed into DJs picked their most popular model which also was on sale and we're giving it a go.

Tah-Dah...

We chose The Sweet Poison Quit Plan chocolate ice cream recipe. Super easy. No eggs even. And I'm loving using all my mum's retro baking accessories.

I also inherited my sister-in-law's dextrose stash as they move overseas next week. It looks a little like caster sugar but is less sweet, weighs less and is squidgy like brown sugar. It takes a bit of getting used to. But here goes.

Now here we get to amateur hour. I hadn't realised that you need to freeze the ice cream maker's mixing bowl for 12+ hour before you can make any ice cream. Oops. So the ice cream mixture went into the fridge to be cooled which isn't a disaster and we ended up putting on the churner at 8am this morning.

Giggi waiting patiently for the churning to occur:

Churning under way:

Final product after a couple of hours in the freezer, with some blueberries and grated 99% Lindt:

The verdict pretty good first effort. Probably could have done with another churn as I didn't leave the freezer bucket in long enough to begin with. But yummy! Here's to our first ice cream this month!

week 3 fructose-free

We are still on the bandwagon possibly more committed than ever. I've finally read the Sweet Poison Quit Plan by David Gillespie and found it thoroughly inspiring. He's a bit sarcastic in tone for me and despite my scientific training I kind of skipped over all the medical stuff. I'm a bit ambivalent about it: he's not medically trained himself and I'm happy to just try it out and see if it's good for us. Although if even half of what he says about fructose is true, it's pretty frightening stuff. Besides the putting on weight issue there are purported links to diabetes (my concern - got to love your genes), dementia, heart disease, stroke, cancer, PCOS, depression and anxiety.

He also has great advice about how to break the addiction. There's the obvious stuff of clearing out your cupboards (anything > 4g of sugar per 100g has got to go). Then there's working out when you're most tempted to indulge in fructose and having a plan of what you're going to substitute instead so that you don't feel deprived. Like the way I have a handful of cashews with my morning coffee... But I found it helped my mindset that we just don't eat the stuff anymore. If you're eating it sometimes you're constantly weighing up 'can I eat this or not'? I love just not having to make the decision, it's just automatically out.

I also LOVED his chapter on how to help your kids in the process. Insightful and wise.

The thing I'm trying to weigh up is whether to eat the sweet substitutes or not. I'm pretty much against the 'artificial' sweeteners. Not loving the metallic aftertaste anymore. I'm just trying to decide whether to go down the road of making your own cakes, biscuits, custard and ice cream using glucose (sold as dextrose in the home brew aisle). I guess it's good for celebrations and helping your kids not to feel left out but I've actually enjoyed not eating that stuff for the last 3 weeks and don't want to get back in the habit. Maybe we can make it less frequent - and I guess if I have to make it all myself (it's not commercially available) we won't be having it as frequently anyway ;-)

We're also giving 100% chocolate a go. Koko Black has a 100% Dominican chocolate bar (around $7.50 for 40g). And Lindt has a 99% excellence bar ($5.10 for 50g). It is a bit like eating cocoa powder but at least you don't demolish the whole block in a sitting. I'll get back to you on which one we prefer. We started with the Dominican...

PS is it terrible to re-gift chocolates or other sugary delicacies we've received when we think it's poison but the recipients are happy to receive them???

a sugar-free update

Well, we've been largely fructose free for 2 weeks now. I'm still addicted to sugar. I still crave something sweet with my coffee. I haven't caved yet though :-)

I've finally started reading David Gillespie's book 'The Sweet Poison Quit Plan' and it's been thoroughly motivating. Plus I've lost a kilo and a half, which is helpful too. Feels weird to lose weight while bumping up your intake of chips, cheese etc. while riding out the addiction phase...

I'm still enjoying being less food focused. But I haven't adjusted to my hunger signals being more finely tuned. I forget to dish myself less and still eat too fast. The result has been a few evenings where I have just felt uncomfortably full even though I've eaten less than I used to. It really is quite amazing and I'm hoping that I can stick to it.

It's still hard for the kids. Giggi keeps asking for pieces of fruit. But I've got more savoury snacks on hand. And the other day when the dr was handing out lollipops we went to a cafe and had a mineral water instead. Giggi wasn't ecstatic about it but he wasn't devastated either. We'll keep persisting.

Here's the largely fructose free cake I made for Rene's birthday:

You can find the recipe here.

BTW he wasn't turning 2, it's just that it was 2 people's birthday. It really wasn't very sweet. I think I would add some sweetness to the 'biscuit base' or maybe use a more sweet nut such as cashews. But the filling was delicious.

one week on - a sugar update

Well we've pretty much managed to stick to the sugar-free plan for the past week. I was surprised to find that I didn't get headaches or even many sugar cravings. The worst is just that first morning coffee, I'm desperate for something sweet. But when you're off sugar even a handful of raw, unsalted cashews tastes creamy and slightly sweet. Actually quite yummy with a cup of coffee.

BTW some sushi seasoning vinegars are sweetened with glucose syrup which is allowed. Yay!

It was quite odd to go and buy a lot of food that I haven't bought much of in the past few years: cheese, crackers, nuts and the only dip we can have is that basil and cashew one. The plan recommends upping your intake of fatty foods in the initial period so that you don't feel as though you're denying yourself. And it is amazing without sugar in your diet you don't even feel that hungry and are easily satiated.

It's great not to feel so controlled by food. It's weird that following this plan feels strangely liberating... a pale imitation but similar nonetheless to the liberation that's found in following Jesus... Anyway, that's just occurred to me, I need to think it through a bit more.

I am quitting sugar

I guess this makes it real :-)

I'm trying Sarah Wilson's I quit sugar program. But also want to read the Sweet Poison stuff from David Gillespie.

I just threw out my first shopping bag full of sugary things from the pantry. It's bin night here and so there's no going back. Funny, but I couldn't yet bring myself to throw out all the syrups, sugars and sauces that we won't be eating any more, or at least not for a while I hope. It's an experiment, we'll see. I couldn't bring myself to throw out all the advent calendar treats, Giggi has been looking forward to them too much. But if I can't cut out most of his other sugar, at least he'll still be having less...

Apparently this is as hard as quitting smoking. I'm so thankful not to have been a smoker. But I'm not sure I'm prepared for how hard this is going to be. Bring on the headaches, let's get this detox over with.