Due to bad weather, we couldn’t make our annual trek to Missouri this Christmas break. Without planning for this, we suddenly found ourselves at home for several days with no school, no work, and no plans. So we did what many people do with free time — we got on a Netflix binge. We eventually landed on the documentary genre, and if this sounds boring to you, then you haven’t watched Netflix documentaries. Many of them are fascinating.

We watched several good, entertaining, and enlightening documentaries. But only one was going to change my life for the next couple of weeks — Fed Up.

If you haven’t seen this, I recommend that you do. It’s very compelling. At the end, they asked viewers to take a challenge to eat NO added sugar for ten days. No added sugar of any kind. This means that if it isn’t natural sugar found in fruits or vegetables, you can’t eat it. For T E N days.

NO SUGAR

I’ve dieted. I’ve tried to eat healthy. I’ve spent years looking at nutrition labels. I knew this challenge was going to be very difficult. But fired up by the documentary, I had three kids who were dying to do this. When I expressed my reluctance and got, “I knew you wouldn’t do it, Mom,” I knew the challenge was going to be mine as well.

So we’ve started and here’s what I’ve learned: sugar is in everything.

I knew sugar was in a lot of things, but in reality, sugar is in just about EVERYTHING. Did you know that healthy greek yogurt — the kind with real fruit — has added sugar other than from the fruit? I didn’t. They actually call it “evaporated cane juice,” but that’s just sugar. Sugar is also in those little flat, healthy-looking pretzel chips and spaghetti sauce and multi-grain crackers and cereal bars and ketchup and every bottled salad dressing and…pretty much anything that’s already made for you.

And speaking of evaporated cane juice, here’s what else I’ve learned: there are at least 57 various terms in a product’s list of ingredients that are really just different names for sugar. 57! if you want to read a complete list, many sources provide them. Here’s one from Prevention.com. I’m trying to learn to recognize these.

And the other thing I’ve learned, right from the start of this challenge, is that healthy, no-sugar eating takes time. Lots of planning, shopping, and meal preparation time. It’s do-able, but you really have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. I do, anyway. Maybe it gets easier and quicker. Maybe.

10 days…

But I can do this for ten days. And those kids who talked me into doing this are going to do it for ten days too, at least while they’re at home and I can see them.

I’ll write a few posts in the next several days about our progress. Maybe you will want to try the no-sugar challenge too. (If you watch the movie, you probably will.)

One more thing — if you run into me at the grocery these next few days and I seem rude, I’m just having sugar withdrawals. I’m probably hungry and irritable about getting talked into this challenge. I apologize in advance.