Sugar detox: Day one

Yesterday, Dave Hamilton posted this intriguing Tweet:

Despite his Tweet reading somewhat like a late-night infomercial (sorry, Dave!), I clicked the link, and found that Dave's blog entry discussed and linked to an article titled I'm Kicking the Sugar Habit!. That article explains how to free oneself from sugar in foods, starting with a brutal-looking "three days without sugar" detox period.

During this period, you're not allowed to eat or drink anything that has sugar in it, whether naturally occurring or artificially added. This basically eliminates 99% of my normal caloric intake. Yikes!

But between Dave's endorsement, the comments to the article, and my own curiosity, I decided I'd give it a try, starting today. Not really a New Year's Resolution per se, but just something to try. To keep myself honest, I decided to write about each day's experiences.

I figured this would be hard for me—even though I don't eat a lot of direct candy-like sweets, I do enjoy fruit, fruit drinks, dairy products, plus breads, pastas, and other carbs. In particular, I really dislike drinking plain water, and choose fruit juice (low calorie, high fruit percentage) whenever I can. Giving up my fruit juice was definitely the thing I feared the most.

The list of things I'm allowed to eat during the three days is quite short, so I went shopping and purchased the following:

• Eggs, salmon, lean hamburger, and chicken.
• Pistachios, peanuts, and almonds
• Lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, celery, and green onions
• One lemon

And that's that; nine meals need to come from those ingredients, plus assorted spices. So what'd I do for day one?

• Breakfast: Two boiled eggs; water.
• Lunch: Grilled chicken strips with green onions and garlic herb spices; water.
• Dinner: Poached salmon with green onions, and a boring salad of lettuce and chopped broccoli; water with lemon.
• Snacks: Assorted nuts (yea, I'm nuts for trying this!).

As I type this (after dinner), the first day wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, with two exceptions. First, I did indeed miss my fruit juice—I'm already sick of the (non) taste of water, lemon or no lemon. Second, it seems I am used to something sweet after dinner—my taste buds are screaming "feed me sweet stuff now!" and I'm doing my best to ignore them.