Diaries of a Girl Gone Dark and Bitter ...Days 2 and 3

Day 2, like Day 1 of trying to go with nearly no sugar, felt like a bit of a failure. And the start of Day 3 is looking grim. Yesterday morning, I was quite proud of myself for not putting agave syrup on my toast and hazelnut butter.  It was on the bitter side, but I was surprisingly fine with it.  So I happily thought: “no sweetener (check!), calories saved as a bonus (check!)” and went on with my day feeling good about this no-sugar thing in January.  

Then at 10:00 a.m., I was wandering around looking for chocolate to taste and wanted to tackle the Amedei CHUAO bar, but my husband suggested that we wait until our colds pass (i.e. until we can taste things properly again).  Begrudgingly, I agreed.  So I went through my entire tasting cupboard and sought out all the chocolate in the 70% range, looking for anything that I might be interested in eating. I pulled out half of a Valor chocolate bar that I've already tasted.  It was a 70% with banana pulp in it.  So I thought, well, it is made with 70% cacao and the only added favour is banana which has natural sugar in it, so why not? 

As I sat and ate the rest of the Valor Banana bar, I thought about dipping bananas in 80% dark chocolate this week and putting them in the freezer for next week.  Then I thought, "wait, is this messing with my goal here?" I am consuming chocolate that tastes much sweeter because of the banana in it, which sort of goes against my goal of acclimating myself to no sweetness so that I can better enjoy unsweetened chocolate. Hmmmm...but at the same time, I did not choose to limit fruit, just anything with added sugar.  So I made a mental note to try to make a banana dark chocolate cake later in the day.  I also decided not to over think this.

Then in the afternoon, with no other good savoury snacks in the house - not even a cracker because I ate everything the day before - I went back to the chocolate cupboard and found some 70% dark chocolate scraps leftover from some chocolate making I was doing. They were small broken bits of tempered single-origin chocolate, so I dug in.  It was like snacking on a bag of chocolate popcorn.  When I started to feel the caffeine buzz I stopped, feeling guilty about the caffeine and baby-nursing thing.

The evening was better, but again it was binge eating on really healthy unsweetened things (had there been Doritos in the house, I am sure I would have eaten them!).  I even ate a small cup of coconut cream (the really thick stuff, like whipped cream).  The problem is: I have had to drop so many things because I am nursing the baby.  Between limiting the amount of peanut butter that I can eat, wine and other alcohol, and coffee, I personally have also had to limit the amount of dairy that I can have because the baby is having trouble digesting it in his breast milk.  And I love milk, lattes and yogurt.  Coconut cream is one of my few other options if I want something thick like yogurt.  So this no-sugar thing is really taking its toll on what I can eat, and I find myself wandering around eating everything that does fit into my diet.

Hopefully my excessive snacking is just a silly mental reaction to not being able to have sugar and I will get over it in a few days. I need to in order to be prepared for next week when I move to +80% chocolate.

So I woke up this morning and felt like today I would be more successful at this no-sugar thing.  Then, my daughter did not finish her toast and peanut butter, so in order not to waste the expensive all-natural, organic "no-stir" peanut butter, I decided I would eat her toast for my breakfast.  As I was starting to write this blog post, it occurred to me that the peanut butter had agave syrup all over it. Darn.

So I guess I will just try to make the rest of today a success. 

Read all about why I am doing this here.  And you can read my Day 1 journal here.