Refined Sweetener Free Challenge

By Cara, on March 22nd, 2010

After going off GAPS I, perhaps, lost self control and started eating entirely too many refined sweeteners (sugar, corn syrup a couple times). Some of them made me feel sick (the free Dr Pepper I got for shopping at our being-remodeled Albertson’s) and that was enough motivation to stop those. For everything else, Rachel from Rachel’s Cooking and I decided we’d do a Refined Sweetener Free Challenge next month. Now I can get back in the habit of not necessarily being completely grain/starch/sugar free, but just be sugar free while also eating whole grains and other Nourishing Traditions food.

Do you want to join in? This can be a challenge that meets you at the level you’re at. A couple years ago cutting out all refined sweeteners would have been way over my head (most prepared food, convenience food, meals out are going to have corn syrup or sugar in them) so I think it’s fair game to modify the challenge in a way that works for you and your family. Maybe that means that all month you don’t use refined sweeteners for one meal a day. Maybe you go completely sugar free during the week, but let it slide on the weekends. Maybe you want to try it for a full 7-day week but not the whole month. Maybe you’re way ahead of me and have already mastered cutting out refined sweeteners, but want to lower the amount of natural sweeteners you use as well.

I’m not here to judge you, just to encourage you to see what you can do! And I know Easter is this month, you can always have that be a ‘cheat’ day if you’d like, or just skip the desserts as I plan on doing. I promise, you can save the chocolate bunnies for May and they’ll still be fine

So, if you want to blog about it, you can go ahead and link up. If you don’t blog, I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
Please link back here as well so your readers can learn more about the challenge! I’ll be getting an image up soon for you to use if you like too.

My Particular ‘rules’ (for myself) for this challenge:

Similar to my ‘no pork’ rule, I have no desire to venture into legalism. If I would be offending someone by not eating food at their house because it has sweetener in it, I put people above ideals (the greatest commandment is love… first of all I am to be loving). But! This is not a loophole. I’m not going to go over to friends’ houses who I know is perfectly used to my abnormalness and pretend that I’d be hurting her feelings by refusing Oreos. ~grin~ And I’m quite sure without even asking that my husband will not be doing this challenge, though as I drag him through this real foods journey he is eating less and less junk food, so he’ll cut down on it just because it won’t be in the house as much.