Journey to Natural Health

We began reducing our sugar intake about a year ago after meeting Christine Cronau in Brisbane. Our children were at school together and it was my daughters’ birthday party and I knew Christine’s daughter had food intolerances, so I asked her if there anything I could make that she could eat. Christine provided me with a few recipes from her book – “Great Health is a Piece of Cake” and this began the first of many conversations about what is really in our food.

I started by reducing the amount of packaged snacks we were buying. I had always looked for “healthy” options to pack into my kids’ lunch boxes, but soon learnt that what I thought was “healthy” was in fact loaded with sugar (not to mention additives, preservatives and other nasties). It wasn’t just the obvious things, like Nutrigrain and LCM bars, it was tomato sauce, muesli bars and breads! I cleaned out the cupboard of all of these things and got to baking my own snacks. I also started reading the labels of any packaged food we purchased and found either no or low sugar alternatives to pasta sauce, tomato sauce and breakfast cereals.

In February this year, we relocated back to Perth from Brisbane and were staying with my sister for 3 weeks while waiting for our new house to be ready. She had just bought a copy of “Sweet Poison” by David Gillespie and both my husband and I read it and were horrified at what he wrote. My family all have sweet tooths, in fact, our family get togethers usually revolved around dessert and there was always a choice of 2 or 3 at each event. Growing up, my mum owned a coffee shop and out house was always full of sweet treats that we devoured after school. As I got older, my sugar cravings got stronger and when I was pregnant with my third child, I could’ve eaten sugar straight from the container (I didn’t – but consumed more than enough Milo, chocolate and ice-cream to sink a ship!). I now know that this was a cause of persistant headaches, thrush outbreaks, anxiety and weight gain throughout my teenage and subsequent adult years. No matter what “diet” I went on, I couldn’t loose all the weight I gained after my pregnancies and constantly felt tired and anxious.

After reading Gillespie’s book, we spent a week away in Busselton and decided that we would go cold turkey off the sugar. We explained to the kids that we wanted to start the year being as healthy as possible and to do this, we needed to kick our sugar addiction and get back to basics with our food. I was amazed and very proud of the response our children gave – “we want to feel good too!”. Over our week away, we shopped, cooked and ate as a family. When we went out for the day, we packed a picnic lunch and didn’t buy any sweet treats (like ice creams or biscuits). After a week without sugar, we all started to notice a difference in how we felt. my headaches had disappeared, we all slept better and both my husband and I started to lose weight.

Once we got back into our “normal” lives, we continued with our no sugar habit. Not only did we all start feeling better, but we found that we weren’t hungry all the time and that my sugar cravings were virtually non-existant. I am still amazed by this as I was a complete sugar addict and would have chocolate every day, and haven’t felt like it since I gave it up. As an experiment, I decided to eat one small Easter egg to see if I could be tempted back to sugar, but I had to spit it out as it tasted like chemicals!

Now, 8 weeks later I have lost 7kgs and am sleeping better and the kids are feeling better and are loving all our cooking at home. My sense of taste and smell are so much more sensitive and real food is tasting fantastic – as it should! I can’t imagine ever going back to eating the way we were, and I certainly don’t intend to.

The danger of eating too much sugar is well documented (Sweet Poison, Dr Mercola, Macrobiotic Guide , yet the vast majority of food on the supermarket shelves is full of it. Tomato sauce can be between 40-50% sugar, Special K has 14.5g of sugar per 100g and a lunch box favourite Kelloggs LCM bar is 1/3 sugar! I will be posting more about sugar in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, if you are trying to reduce your or your kids’ sugar intake, try to find products with less than 5g of sugar per 100g and you’re onto a good start.