End of February, we’re one month away from spring in the Northern Hemisphere! What does February look like, where you live?
I now live in Central Italy, and here it’s a really beautiful time of year! You have cold nights and frosty mornings that look absolutely amazing, and then you have mild, sunny days with the most beautiful light and a lot of plants blooming already.
Depending on where you live, you’re likely to be slowly coming out of a period of rather heavy comfort foods. Also, you might have indulged in quite some sugar and less-than-ideal fats over the holidays. Studies show that the majority of people in the West never manage to clean all of that out of their systems, before the following holiday season one year later…
Here’s an idea for you:
Have you ever lived a whole month without any sugar or artificial sweeteners? Fancy trying a sugar detox? You’ll love it, I promise! The first three to four days might be a bit tricky, but after that, it will become easier and easier.
If you want to do it, here are a couple of quick guidelines for you. You need to avoid:
● white, brown, and black cane sugar, including molasses. This means avoiding chocolate that’s less than 100% cocoa, candies and sweets, jams and marmalades, pastries and cookies, sweet drinks, and most industrial foods, even savoury ones, like mayonnaise for example, or most preserves, dressings, sauces, this is absolutely insane if you ask me, but they do throw sugar in everything!
● sugar-free, artificially sweetened drinks and jams and sweets and chewing gums
If you want some sweet-tasting foods, you can still eat some fruit and berries, carrots, sweet potatoes, you can have some dates, some agave or maple syrup. Just don’t overdo it, try not to fully make up for the missing sugar. Some of that is ok, definitely allow yourself a few treats, but bear in mind that your body doesn’t need to get a lot of sugar from food, because it produces its own very efficiently from proteins and fats.
Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions, you might not be sure about one thing or another, and also if you need some help with the mindset behind all of that.
If you’re coming from a place of “depriving yourself of all the things you like the most”, it’s not going to work. You have to shift to the new place of “not wanting to poison your body with things you are used to having”. So you assume you “love” them, but that’s not real love, that’s more of an old conditioning. Your tastebuds think they love them, but your body knows better, and it will teach your tastebuds, if you give it a chance to do so.
Easier said than done? At the beginning, for sure. But you can learn how to deal with this in a brilliant way, and never be a victim of food again.
