Our family has now completed four days of the Fed Up No Sugar Challenge, and I’m going to say — so far, so good. I wrote about beginning the challenge here. The tricky part of this is figuring out what to fix for lunches and dinners. I’ve spent a lot of time searching for no-sugar recipes, and I’ve found some good ones (I think) that I’d love to share with you as I try them. I’ve only tried one new one so far (it was great!), and then a few of my tried-and-true dinners have worked.

Finding meal ideas, and spending the time required in the kitchen to prepare them, have been the difficult parts. The satisfying part is that the meals have been filling and delicious. I haven’t experienced nearly the amount of hunger that I normally do, and I’m actually eating less calories. This has really surprised me.

Up to this point, I’ve just had a banana and a cup of coffee each morning for breakfast. It’s what I eat often anyway, and even though bananas have 14 grams (!) of sugar, it’s natural sugar, so I’m not worrying about it. This breakfast is easy, healthy, and I like it. Done.

Lunches

For these first four days, I’ve had omelettes, tuna fish salad (a bit of a mistake, I discovered) and, of course, salads.

In case you don’t make omelettes,

they’re not nearly as hard as they look. Here’s all you do for the ones I’m making. Of course, you can sub in whatever ingredients you want…

Saute 1 tbsp olive oil in a small pan (omelette sized). Add sliced fresh mushrooms.

After they’ve cooked for just a bit, add about 2 cups of fresh spinach — so much that it barely fits in the pan. Just leave it be and pretty soon the spinach on the bottom will cook down enough that it will all start to fit. Stir it around and when the spinach is wilted, toss in a few sliced grape tomatoes for just a bit. (Or whatever tomato you have, I have these from the salads I’m making this week.)

When everything is warmed and wilted, dump it on a plate.

Add more olive oil to the same pan and heat. Stir up two eggs and pour into the pan on medium-high heat. As it cooks, tip the pan so that the uncooked egg runs to the side and lift the cooked part so the runny part gets underneath onto the pan.

When the egg is cooked through, add the cooked veggies back onto the top of the egg. Then sprinkle shredded cheese (I like cheddar) along a line down the middle of the omelette. Then just slide the omelette onto your plate and fold it in half. Voila!

I walked one of my teenage daughters through the process and here is her first-ever omelette. Beautiful!

Tuna fish salad

On Day 1, when I was trying to figure out a healthy and tasty lunch, I thought about my old standby, tuna fish salad. I love this lunch. I thought if I left out the bread, it would work.  So I grabbed my jar of Hellman’s Real Mayonnaise and looked at the nutrition label. Sugar wasn’t listed at all. But in little bitty print at the bottom of the label, it said, “Not a significant source of fiber, sugar…” Good enough.

So I mostly made my usual tuna salad: 1 can of drained albacore white tuna packed in water, a little bit of chopped onion, about half a stalk of chopped celery, one chopped up hard boiled egg, just a littlle mayo, and some salt and pepper Yum. I did leave out my usual sweet pickles because — not surprisingly — they have added sugar. I put this on sliced tomatoes instead of bread and enjoyed.

Looking at just the nutritional label is not enough

After being at this challenge for a few more meals though, I realized that just looking at the nutrition label wasn’t enough. I needed to read the ingredient list, too. Sure enough, there is sugar added to mayo. I should have known better. It’s the 6th ingredient, so not much. And overall, I think this is a pretty healthy lunch, so I’m not going to beat myself up over it. But it shouldn’t have qualified as a no-sugar-added dish. Oh well, moving on…

Of course, no healthy eating plan is complete without lots of salads.

I’ve been learning to love salads for awhile, and I think the key to enjoying them is to add a variety of ingredients.

I made a really good salad for one lunch with the leftover roasted chicken we had for dinner the night before (recipe below). I always start all of my salads with the bagged Spring Mix lettuce. For this salad, I added chopped up roasted chicken, half of a chopped up avocado, cherry tomatoes and my favorite pre-challenge dressing: Rachael Ray balsamic drizzle and olive oil. The Rachael Ray drizzle has some sugar in it, but I decided that it’s natural sugar so again, I’m not worrying about it. I’m already giving up so much, don’t take my balsamic drizzle! This salad was really yummy. I’ll definitely be having it the next time I have leftover roasted chicken.

My other salad this week was a tried and true favorite: the same Spring Mix lettuce, grape tomatoes, red onion slices and 1/4 cup of crumbled feta cheese. I have this salad a lot. AND the bagged croutons I love have no sugar (!), so I included just a few of those.

I’m going to keep eating a lot of salads for lunches, even after the challenge is over. To try to avoid getting tired of them, I’ll vary the toppings. Here’s a list of healthy salad ingredients I plan to use in different combos:

• Shredded carrots
• Beans – black or dark red kidney beans
• avocado
• tomato
• hard boiled egg
• sliced mushrooms
• slivered or sliced almonds
• feta or goat cheese
• bell peppers
• broccoli
• cauliflower
• chicken breast
• chickpeas
• red onion
• sunflower seeds

That will be enough variety not to get sick of salads. Right? Here’s hoping…

Dinners

Salmon

All I usually do to cook salmon is to pull out the good ol’ George Foreman grill. Brush each side of the salmon with olive oil, sprinkle on some sea salt, and put it on the Foreman grill for a few minutes. Don’t overcook! This has always been one of our favorite dinners — way before we started the no sugar challenge.

Whole Chicken In A Crockpot

I found this recipe for an easy and delicious crockpot chicken online at 100 Days Of Real Food. The chicken was easy, healthy, and everyone loved it. I will definitely be making this again soon. You can find it, along with many other good recipes, here.

Ingredients

• 2 teaspoons paprika
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon onion powder
• 1 teaspoon thyme
• ½ teaspoon garlic powder
• ¼ teaspoon cayenne (red) pepper
• ¼ teaspoon black pepper
• 1 onion
• 1 large chicken

NOTE: I made an 7.5 pound chicken (about twice as large as the one listed), so I doubled all of the spice ingredients.

Instructions

1. Combine the dried spices in a small bowl.
2. Loosely chop the onion and place it in the bottom of the slow cooker.
3. Remove any giblets from the chicken and then rub the spice mixture all over. You can even put some of the spices inside the cavity and under the skin covering the breasts.
4. Put prepared chicken on top of the onions in the slow cooker. Cover it, and turn it on to high. There is no need to add any liquid.
5. Cook for 4 – 5 hours on high (for a 3 or 4 pound chicken) or until the chicken is falling off the bone.

 (Again, my chicken was larger than the one in this recipe, so I cooked it for about 6 hours on high. Use a meat thermometer to test for doneness and make sure it registers at 165 degrees.)

This chicken really did just fall apart. Pull off the skin and enjoy. Even after removing the skin, the chicken has a great flavor.

Roasted Portabella Mushroom Caps

This is another dish that we enjoyed pre-challenge, but it meets all the requirements for no added sugar, so it was a good dinner choice. These are yummy — another one of our favorites.

Ingredients

• 4 large portobello mushrooms, stems removed
• salt and pepper to taste
• 8 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
• chopped tomatoes

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 450°F. Coat a rimmed baking sheet with olive oil cooking spray.
2. Place mushroom caps, with stems removed and gill-side up, on the pan. Sprinkle with a little salt and pepper. Roast until tender, about 20 minutes.
3. Remove the mushrooms from the oven. (If they have liquid in the center of the mushrooms, grab some tongs and pour the juice off.) Top each cap with about 2 tablespoons of shredded parmesan cheese. Return to the oven and roast until cheese is melted.
4. Remove from oven and top with diced tomatoes.

Sides

We’ve tried our first quinoa (didn’t fall in love, I’ll try one more time), steamed carrots with butter, and sauteed spinach that I tried to copy after having it recently at one of my favorite restaurants, Rockfish Seafood Grill. We’ve actually had the spinach twice already, because everyone really liked it. And my kids didn’t even like spinach before I cooked it this way!

For the sauteed spinach,

heat olive oil in a large skillet and add pressed garlic (we like garlic, so I used five cloves.) When olive oil is hot, add a large bag of fresh spinach leaves. It can be too much for the pan and be taller than the pan.

I used a 3 pound bag of spinach for my family of five. Just leave it be and the spinach on the bottom will cook down enough for the rest to fit in the pan. As it wilts, stir it around so that it all cooks down. When it is just wilted, it’s ready to serve. Can’t be much easier than that! And it’s healthy, delicious and no sugar! Win, win, win.

My only snacks so far have been almonds (another surprising thing with natural sugar) and strawberries. One of my daughters discovered that Goldfish crackers have no sugar, so she’s been munching the heck out of those this week. I’m going to try to snack a little healthier throughout this challenge though, so no Goldfish crackers for me. (Okay, I realize this isn’t much different than the croutons I just talked about using…)

MyFitnessPal

One last thing I’d like to add that has been super helpful during this process is the app MyFitnessPal. I don’t have any affiliation with them and have no benefit in mentioning it, but I want to mention it because I think this app is invaluable when you are trying to watch something like calories, sugar, sodium, saturated fat, etc.

If you haven’t tried it, the MyFitnessPal app gives you a breakdown of all the nutrients you’re eating during the day. As you enter what you’ve eaten, it keeps track of how many calories you have left for the day. And then for my favorite part: when you complete your food diary for the day, it tells you what you’ll weigh five weeks from now if you eat just like you did today. That’s kind of fun to see. It’s free and very helpful; I definitely recommend it.

We’re almost halfway through our challenge and so far, this really hasn’t been too hard. I’ll check back when we’re done!