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.

easter eggsperiment #1

so... trying to be low fructose at easter time isn't easy. Here's what we've done to mitigate sugar consumption at this special time of year.

1) lower fructose hot cross buns
I used this recipe from taste.com as the basis.
My modifications were:
- substitute dextrose for the caster sugar
- substitute a diced green apple for half the sultanas
- lower the oven temperature to 170 C
It didn't quite taste as good but it was better for us and we didn't feel like we were missing out.

2) lower fructose easter eggs
So this 'eggsperiment' didn't quite work but here goes.
I used the low fructose chocolate recipe from here.
My modifications were:
- substitute dextrose for the regular sugar and add twice as much
(nb the dessicated coconut is 6g sugar/100g which isn't fructose free but not too bad considering)
This chocolate is great if you like it really coconutty and perfect if you don't really like dark chocolate. It doesn't however set very hard so isn't really appropriate for making into hollow eggs.
It did work fine in chocolate moulds so we channelled a northern hemisphere easter and made spring flower chocolates - I particularly liked the daffodils.

Tomorrow we try the egg moulds with dark chocolate. I'll keep you posted.

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???

my birthday ice cream

There are a bunch of great low fructose cake recipes out there. I've made a couple of cakes from The Sweet Poison Quit Plan and they've all been good.

For my birthday this year, however, I made this delicious ice cream and as my gift to you, I thought I'd share my recipe.

my choc mint ice cream

Ingredients:
1 cup milk
1 cup mint leaves (tightly packed), you can use more :-)
1 cup dextrose
2 cups thickened cream
1 tbsp vanilla
30g chopped 85% Green & Black's chocolate

Method:
Heat the milk in a saucepan until it's steaming. Take it off the heat and add the mint leaves. Leave them for half an hour and then blend using a stick blender.
Add the sugar and mix further to dissolve. Stir in the cream and vanilla.
Put in the fridge for as long as you can, and then even in the freezer for an hour to make it as cold as you can.
Churn in an ice cream maker until it's almost overflowing (if you're using a 1.5L machine). Add the chopped up chocolate a couple of minutes before it's finished.
You might still need to stick it in the freezer for a couple of hours - depends on how soft you like it.

In other good news a fair few ice cream cones fall below 4g of sugar/100g, unfortunately it's not the waffle cones.

Enjoy :-)

navigating morning tea

We found ourselves in a bit of a pickle this week. We'd arranged to have morning tea with some dear old family friends but had neglected to tell them about our seismic shift in diet. The morning of, I thought help what are we going to do? So I packed some dip and crackers to take with. Such as I've mentioned here. Then I chickened out. I didn't pull them out when I arrived. I just felt like it was too rude.

They had baked a beautiful lemon and yoghurt cake. It was absolutely delicious. Yes I had a slice. Well, in fact I had only half a slice. It was all I wanted. The fructose may have put my appetite control out for the next few days I suspect, but it was ok. I didn't start trying to lay my hands on sugary delights with abandon. I didn't fall off the wagon. This is for keeps.

Next time I'll let them know in advance and give a few suggestions of what we can eat and offer to bring something along.... Next time....

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

adventures in low fructose cooking: muffins

Well we're 6 weeks in to our fructose-free adventure. I was hoping that by now we'd have a bit more control over our appetites. Mine seems to be still fructose effected.

We have been eating a bit of 85% chocolate mainly because on holidays we weren't able to source anything stronger. BTW the Green & Black's 85% with Madagascan vanilla is far superior to the Lindt equivalent.

I also want to try eating more slowly and waiting (15-20mins) to give myself a chance to feel full.

I'm also taking the advice from The Sweet Poison Quit Plan of sticking to sweetener alternatives rather than glucose while we wait for our addiction and appetites to come under control.

Anyway I've gotten hold of Natvia which is I suppose the best of a bad bunch. It is derived from a natural source, part of the Stevia plant, is much sweeter than sugar but has many less calories. However, it hasn't been used for a very long time so the jury's out as to whether it has any harmful effects. A good thing however is that I don't think it has as nasty an after taste as some of the other sweeteners.

So here's our first go at baking with Natvia. We made banana muffins, a variation on the blueberry muffin recipe found on the natvia website. Find the recipe here. And while they're not fructose-free because of the banana, 2 bananas are spread over 22 muffins...

Our's were about half the size of the recipe so only needed 15mins. And they were quite crumbly so I may have over cooked them.

None of us could stop at one. They were a success all round. Even little badger thoroughly enjoyed his.

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: 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???