How to make banana "ice cream"

Banana "ice cream"

First of all, you need to freeze some cut up banana - I use one banana per person. Here is one I prepared earlier... 🍌🍌

Put the banana in your food processor (or whizzy machine, as it's known in our house), then whizzy up the banana until it's kind of grainy...

Then add whatever you fancy; I chose peanut butter, cacao powder and honey (1 tbs of each).

Then whizzy it up again, until it's all mixed.

Voila - chocolate, peanut butter "ice cream" 🍌🍫🍦

Fast, easy, yummy and healthy 😃😃🍦🍫🍌🍦🍫🍌🍦🍫🍌😃😃

Home alone - the sugar free edition

I can't lie, I am thinking about my usual Hubby's-away-crack-open-the-wine-and-chocolate. But it's not all consuming and deli snacks are cutting the mustard.

The whites of my eyes

... are noticeably whiter today. I don't know when it happened but it's pretty.

We trotted off to the garden centre in true British bank holiday fashion today. We decided to grab some picnic stuff in Tesco on the way. I chose a reduced price feta salad with quinoa and some sushi. I ate them with a saintly aura surrounding me, before reading the ingredients... Sugar. Heaps of it.  Poo.

Resisted

Despite my best efforts, my children, especially my eldest, are sugar fiends. Today we had lunch at Mum's and she served ice cream for pudding. I was relieved to find I wasn't remotely tempted as I often over indulge at Mum's. My son asked for seconds though and I had an argument with Mum about why that was not acceptable. Later, when I wasn't looking, she fed him a chocolate bar. Juggling the different expectations and desires of family members is hard. Teaching children healthy habits is hard. There comes a time when peer pressure kicks in that you have to trust them to make the right choices. Doesn't look like my 7 year old is not quite on the right track.

Anyway, I was going to discuss thirst. My diabetic relative reports she does not feel thirst like she should. I know she often eats when it is actually thirst she is feeling. Anyway, since giving up sugar, I've become more aware of my sense of thirst and it's much easier to distinguish from hunger.  I don't have to remind myself to drink anymore. That has to be a good thing.

This week I am not feeling full of energy. I also haven't lost any weight. I suspect increased bread consumption is playing a part.  Bread and I don't get on. I'm just finding hard to actually eat enough and have been topping up with bread.  I'll sort that out this in the coming week :-)

A history lesson

I've just been watching something on TV about how sugar was so essential to moral during WW2 that the Silvertown sugar refinery in London began building air raid shelters two years before the Blitz began. And workers never left the site, even at the height of the blitz. The Germans targeted the sugar factory specifically, presumably because they knew how important sugar was to us. It makes me wonder about how London's landscape could have been changed if we weren't so reliant on sugar.

It's happened!

Everyone at work is telling me I'm glowing! Two different people have told me my skin looks good today :-)

Another side effect I noticed yesterday is a new sense of thirst.  I'll write more on that later.

A treat

Today, my daughter and I went on a trip to a nearby city's whole food shop.  It's a long way, so I only go every few months to stock up on a few things I can't get locally, like reasonably priced coconut oil and a tea that I can't live without.

The shop also has a cafe upstairs that sells a selection of vegetarian, vegan and gluten free meals.  Today I had a mushroom quiche with cornbread and salad and my daughter had a hummus sandwich and salad.  But the best thing is they sell a range of sugar and artificial sweetener free puddings :-)  Here is a vegan raw chocolate cheesecake I took to takeaway and eat later... divine.

Seriously?!

I am utterly speechless. In a good way. I couldn't think of a title that expressed my shock and surprise when I stepped on the scales this morning. 10st12lb. I've been battling to get below 11st again since Christmas. I like 10st7lb the best. But I've been eating whatever I like, when I like for what, two weeks now, and I've lost 6lb. I know I lost a couple when I was ill, but even so. And what's more, its the wobbly bits, not my lovely muscle. My muffin tops have gone - hurrah! I didn't know sugar could do that. I didn't know that a calorie deficit with sugar would produce slower weight loss than not calorie counting sugar free foods. Weird science.

Also, last night around 10pm, I suddenly felt ALIVE! I felt I could run for miles and dance and leap and play. I didn't of course. I sensibly went to bed and slept right through. No insomnia here folks. (It's not unusual for me to go through periods of good sleep though, so that might not be the sugar) Anyway, not the most interesting of updates, but an important one to record for the journey I think. Have a nice day anyone who's reading :-)

Poorly tummy

In case anyone was wondering if my lapse led to anything else, no I got straight back on the sugar free horse. On Wednesday night I made some banana ice cream with cocoa in it. And it came back to see me again in the early hours of Thursday morning :-( Not good, and I think it's put me off banana for a long while. A lovely neighbour brought round some Pepsi Max to settle my stomach and I drank it all before remembering I'm not having artificial sweeteners, but I'm not going to beat myself up over it as it was to settle my stomach. Tonight's evening snack has been homemade popcorn sprinkled with cayenne pepper - yum. And a cup of Attic Spice choco tea, which is infused with cocoa beans and cloves amongst other things.

One thing I was reflecting on today is that it's much easier to steer clear of the sweet stuff now. Today I was home alone (not allowed back to work so soon after an upset stomach) and normally that would have led me to having one or two naughty treats in front of daytime TV. I drove past the supermarket and did consider it, but it was so easy to drive past. The allure had gone. I'm yet to encounter how strong the pull will be when I'm upset over something. I'm a big emotional eater. I also have certain rituals. Like if my hubby is away for the weekend, I will have a big bar of cadbury or galaxy to myself. Time will tell as he's away at the end of this month...

The juicy details

I feel a bit of a fraud posting my last entry like it was just the beginning.  Basically, I couldn’t wait for Daisy to finish her three months and hand over the reigns to me.  Last Tuesday I began my sugar free life, so it’s been over a week and I’ve already past the exciting, gruesome details part of the blog.  The juicy bit that anyone considering ditching sugar is interested in.  Not that I was in much of a fit state to be typing.  This is how I remember it.

Tuesday – A quiet day at home.  I ate sugar free and it was easy.  Curious to know how many Weight Watchers points I’d eaten without my legal fix, I totted it up and realised I should lose weight easily, despite eating nuts and increasing the fat content of my meals.

Wednesday – I boldly told the folks in the staffroom that I’m giving up sugar.  Most of them looked at me as if I'd grown an extra head, except for one kindred spirit who gave me some tips.  The caretaker told me he looks forward to meeting the new woman I will become.  I wasn’t sure how to take that.  I also worried about the timescale of Daisy’s withdrawal symptoms.  If I followed her pattern, I would be doomed for the Moonwalk I was due to complete.  Eek, what had I done?

Thursday – Oh boy.  I don’t remember much of the day.  I had the headache from hell.  I had trouble keeping my eyes open and people were commenting that I looked awful.  Kindred Spirit gave me a pep talk and told me I was going through the worst of it and not to listen to other people’s negativity.  By the time I had put the kids to bed, I had crammed a tonne of more natural carbs, including jacket potato, strawberries and banana ‘ice cream’ but nothing was helping – every tiny movement sent shockwaves through my head.  I felt sick and had weird spasms going on with my right eyelid.  I went to bed just past 8pm and was actually hallucinating. 

Friday – I woke up feeling pretty decent actually.  I slept past my 5am alarm, which is very rare for this confirmed insomniac. I still had the remnants of the headache and I did take some paracetamol which I wouldn’t normally.  Kindred Spirit had told me it was important to be gentle with myself after all.  Which brings me to…

Saturday – It seems my idea of being gentle with myself is power walking a marathon, half naked, for charity.  In the morning I felt like I had a cold coming so I glugged pints of water with Echinacea and didn’t tell anyone as I knew they’d tell me not to do the walk.  I packed my bumbag full of nuts and Nãkd snacks and headed to London.  I was worried as all my training had involved chocolate almonds and hot cross buns as fuel and every marathoner will tell you never to change your fuel source on marathon day.  I needn’t have worried.  Turns out nuts and Nãkd make very good power walking snacks combined with the banana they hand out on the walk. 

Sunday – Gah – the end of the Moonwalk and the porridge van wasn’t there like normal!  Most reluctantly I ate a large cheese burger and man, it tasted good.  I should have eaten another one.  I was blinkin hungry.  And when I got home I ate… 4 Oreos and a Cadbury Crème Egg.  Bad Tea Lady. The egg didn’t even taste that nice.  Note to self: from now on, after vigourous exercise, fill up on carbs and protein.  Onwards and upwards…

A proper hello

Hi, I'm TheTeaLady and I'm a sugar addict.  I'm a friend of Daisy's, and I've kind of hijacked her blog.  I did ask and she accepted.  The deal is, once my three months are up, I will pass on the reigns to someone else who wants to accept the Three Months Sugar Free challenge. 

Where Daisy goes in life, I tend to follow at some point in the future.  She's what you'd call a good influence on me.  So, enough of singing her praises.  I've been toying with the idea of going sugar free for a while.  I have yeast issues, a family history of diabetes and obesity and a crazy sweet tooth.  I was borderline morbidly obese a couple of years ago, and though I have got down to a much healthier weight (Still slightly over weight, but I'm a mummy with a tummy and a fair amount of muscle too), I'm aware that I'm hideously addicted to sugar and it leads me on binges that can last several weeks.  I want to kick the habit before I lose my leg through diabetes like one family member, or my sight like two family members.  The realities of diabetes are very close to my heart.

So, I’m giving up the white powder.  Cold turkey.  Like Daisy, I’ve read a little on the old internet about what to expect.  I’ve obviously followed her progress and can call on her for advice.  I’m scared.  I’m worried about the hidden sugars in foods that I don’t associate as being ‘sweet’ foods.  I’m scared that, as a perfectionist, I’ll fail because I physically can’t remove all refined white powdery blissfulness from my diet.  I’m a busy mum who works and generally lives in the same manic world you all do.  I just don’t have time to cook every single thing from scratch.  So, I think my basic rules will be – cook what I can from scratch. No sweets, cakes, biscuits and all the obvious stuff.  No artificial sweeteners.  And eat sugar if it is listed as the 5^th ingredient or lower on the ingredients list.  Exciting times J

Oh, and if you caught my first rather brief post, I completed the 26.2 mile Moonwalk sugar free J

You want me to do a marathon backwards?

Well Hi, I've landed and you've caught me on the run.  I have a lovely nice to meet you speech planned (thanking Daisy and all that important stuff), but my invitation to join Blogger arrived just as I'm about to walk out the door to complete the Moonwalk.  So Hello, and I'll write more when I've finished power walking a marathon, around London, in my bra, at midnight - sugar free!

adieu, bon appetite, and welcome to a new three monther.

Today marks three months since the start of this blog!

As the title states, I wanted to try the sugar free life for three months and I've done it. In fact I've cruised it.

The first couple of weeks were insanely hard, the headache almost took over for 24 hours! But my life is immeasurably improved.

In what way?

1. My moods have levelled out, there are few spikes or drops, but when they happen I know it's genuine.
2. I don't know when I'm due to start my period, other than a low feeling of pressure when I do start. There are no tears, no snapping at the family, no cramps nor backache.
3. I have energy to do things, it's a continuous energy that doesn't fluctuate throughout the day. 
4. I no longer feel like I've been filled with a thick liquid that makes moving seem like too much effort.
5. I no longer crave nor want sugar. I often think that I want a slice of cake, but it's not the same. My mind isn't taken over by the need for cake, I don't lose sight of anything else until I've sliced off a wedge and crammed it into my mouth, only to be filled with regret afterwards. I only want cake because, sometimes, I think I'm missing out. Then I just need to remember all the positives I have going for me instead.
6. The most important change is that I often, spontaneously, run around and play tag with my kids. And I've done this before they're too old to play tag. This is the best positive that has come from my experiment. 

Experiment? It now feels far more like a life change than an experiment now.

And as my three months are done it's time to pass it forward. I'm going to pass this blog to a friend of mine who also wants to try this experiment so, for anyone who has read this - thank you, good night and enjoy the lovely writings of a good friend from now on. 

Oh, and good luck on the moonwalk tonight :-)

daily menus.

I have been asked to write sample daily menus and, now I'm coming close to the end of my three months, I should talk about it.

Breakfast is always a variaron on the theme of porridge. Sometimes I eat the oats raw (it's a childhood thing, I love it). If it's cooked I add honey and nuts, when it's raw I add fruit. It's yummy ;)

Lunch could be eg. A 2 egg omelet with some kind of meat, some veggies like peppers, avocado, tomatoes, courgette. I may chuck in some cheese or seeds. Sometimes I do a salad with similar things. I might do soup. But it's usually a case of chucking together stuff that I have in the fridge...

Dinner is whatever we're eating for dinner, be it fish, chips and peas our curry our shepherds pie. Whatever it is, just ensure there's no sugar or chemical crap in it.

For pudding I often eat full fat, plain yogurt with honey and I might add some fruit or nuts. I also make 'Ice cream'. Put a sliced up banana in the freezer, once it's frozen (doesn't take long), whizz it up in a blender. It will go through a period of being granular before becoming like ready scoop ice cream.  add in some cocoa powder and some peanut butter for flavour.

I have a lot of recipes on pintrest, and I haven't found a dud one yet.

I'm still here.

I haven't abandoned my blog, far from it, I think about it often and what I should write. There comes my stumbling block - what should I write? The subject does seem to be a little too one dimensional to be able to delve into in depth.

I certainly haven't told many of the general populous that I'm not eating sugar as it seems to result in the same reaction.

Firstly the person looks at me as though I'm mad, they often give a high pitched laugh before launching in with comments regarding how they could never do that, they would but it's the chocolate you know. They couldn't live without the chocolate.

I know someone, online, who's son is an ex heroin addict. I say ex, but no one is ever an ex addict. Once addicted, always addicted. The difference is in the choice made. To keep going or to get help. I remember when she was at her wits end, when she didn't trust him nor believe a word he said. His desire for heroin overrode everything else.

I'm not saying that sugar does this to people but, as an outsider, I see it in a lot of people - it's as though sugar is humanity's shared dirty secret.

In the school I work in there are often cakes and biscuits in the staff room, left by someone who's celebrating their birthday. I no longer have any interest in them but I watch the staff do exactly what I remember doing. They come over, take one and sit down. They keep having little looks towards that packet, they laugh in a self effacing way and say "I'll just have one more!" Everyone laughs with them as they take one more. Then the others take that as their cue to have a cake too - they weren't the first to eat one, after all.

I see kids, my own included, see something sweet and sticky, their eyes get wider and they shout "chocolate!" excitedly. I even see it on kids tv when the presenters' eyes light up at the mention of something sweet, gooey and 'bad'. But they carry on normally, sometimes making negative faces, when taking about something healthy.

Sugar has made, and continues to make, the western population of this world fat. Our obesity issue is not down to our fat intake, it's the sugar or the sugar/fat combo.

My weight is still coming off - although I don't have vast quantities of weight to lose, I had put some on - in two months I have lost 6lbs. In my old fat-cutting days I'd have been horrified at how slowly it was coming off but I'm not trying now. I eat whatever I want, just without the sugar. I'm not suffering,  I'm rarely hungry and hardly think about food between meals.

I also haven't caught a single one of the colds that I've been in contact with during this time. And trust me, I've been sneezed on, coughed on and had bogies handed to me by numerous kids.

I know this entry in my blog seems very lecturey but it truly is just observation.

winter warming.

One thing I've been missing are cups of hot chocolate. When me and my daughters have been out on a cold day - and we've had some cold, wet days this year! - we love coming home, getting warm and having hot chocolate together. Some days an infusion of lemon and ginger doesn't really do it.

So my physio had a fantastic suggestion.

Why don't you have a mug of cocoa, sweetened with honey?

My mum used to make us cocoa on cold winter days and I didn't really like it but I was a child and sugar was a part of my life so I bought a tub of Cadbury bourneville cocoa today and heated up some milk. I mixed a teaspoon of cocoa with a little cold milk, I mixed in the hot milk and added a squeeze of honey.

Oh. My. Goodness! It was divine!!

I'm so glad that I can still indulge in hot chocolate :)

forgetfull

I don't think about writing here as much as I should. But there is a good reason. A reason that I haven't quite come to terms with.

Sugar rarely tempts me.

Okay, there was that blip as the weekend but I didn't actually eat anything sugary. But yesterday at the breastfeeding group I W's cutting cake for the mums and didn't even consider cutting any for myself. Not at any point did I wish that I could have had some.

Later on I saw a tv advert for Twix - a chocolate bar. As they drizzled the chocolate over the biscuit centre I tried to imagine the taste - as I have many times before without effort. I've drooled or of desire for that chocolate. But yesterday? I just couldn't achieve that reaction! It was like trying to imagine the taste of wood!

So now I have these feelings - kind of like I've lost a part of myself. Sugar has always been there. I love the extravagance of scones with jam and cream, cakes with slightly too much icing. A chocolate bar sneaked here and a packet of custard creams in front of a movie. These threebgs all seem lost to me now.

No one mentioned the grieving.

dopamine.

I was at my regular physio appointment last night. I'm a runner and was injured last year, I'm slowly (literally!) getting back into the swing of things but to avoid re-injury I need to pay for pain on a regular basis.

Knowing that he believes the same as me, that fat is healthier than sugar, I talked to him about my 3 month plan (between screaming and swearing as he cracked my back, loosened my itb and kept my achilles loose). He told me something interesting.

Apparently nearly all food releases dopamines in our brains which causes us pleasure from eating. The only food that he knew of which doesn't have this affect is broccoli! This is why most kids don't like it - of course 50% of my kids do.

Anyway, if we eat food regularly the quantity of dopamine released becomes lower which encourages us to eat a balanced diet. We look for new foods or food that we haven't eaten recently in order to get a bigger dopamine release.

However - the release of dopamine doesn't decline with sugar consumption meaning that we never get sick of these foods and that includes many pre-packaged 'savoury' foods which are packed full of sugar too.

It's certainly something else to think about. And reminds me about a complaint I once had about mother nature not realising that we had invented the supermarket. Why couldn't we evolve away from the need to overeat.

This helps me to understand that it isn't about needing to evolve - it's about our reliance on crap food.

aaaggghhhhhh!

I WANT SUGAR AND I WANT IT NOW!!! 

Talk me down people, talk me down!

Premenstrual and with a prepubescent, hormonal child who just OD'd on sugar at a pizza hut party. She's rolling like a roller coaster on super speed and I'm just waiting for the crash.

It's going to be ugly...

forgive me blogger...

...for I have sinned. NO!   I haven't eaten sugar but I've been away too long!

At first I thought that this blog could rapidly descend into boring-land as I was likely to get drawn into repetitions of "i didn't eat sugar. I feel super energetic." Ya know, it's not screaming "fun!" is it!

So... I planned to read a little. A little pro sugar some anti sugar and report on my findings and thoughts but Holy Crap there is A LOT out there in interwebs land *shudders*. All sincere and all contradicting each other. One thing I found interesting was a sort-of investigation done by identical twins. One gave up all sugars for a month while the other gave up all fats for the same month. Given their identical genetic make-up it should make it a fairly even test. 

Their findings were that neither option seemed better than the other and further findings showed that the big issue was with the mix of sugar and fat. Apparently it's the combination that switches off the 'I'm full now' switch in our brain. So chocolate, desserts, cakes all these things that we consider to be treats are what lead us to eat more of them.

For me it's been, what? A couple or three weeks? Something like that and I'm hardly getting cravings. I would still like a big fat slice of carrot cake but that's different from losing sight of everything until I manage to get some. 

Although my daughter came home from a trip to Cadbury World today and, in her possession were three bars of chocolate and a bag of chocolate buttons. I must confess that I dove into the larder with a teaspoon and had a mouthful of honey to  deal with wanting the chocolate!

All in all, and so far, life without sugar is going well. Of course, I may have pms to deal with - I'll let you know how that goes...