Sugar, honey, sweetie, it's gotta stop!

OK, I'm going to come clean, and hopefully get clean.

I am a complete sugar addict, and it's started to really affect my life. I've got to do something about it. I've gone out of control over the past week, and I'm tired of it. Literally tired. Like falling asleep while I drive around the block so my baby will nap tired. I was slapping myself in the face on Friday afternoon as I drove a few miles to get Jordan to nap because I was honestly having trouble keeping my eyes open. It's that mid-afternoon slump, brought on by repeated sugar crashes.

All last week, since I made cupcakes for Jordan's birthday party, I have been dipping into the sugar, and all week long I felt horrible. Physically I had no energy, my mood was horrible and low, I didn't feel like working out or really like doing ANYTHING. I was woozy and felt mentally kind of numb. I was dipping into the pantry looking for something sweet all day every day only to crash harder after I ate it. My lowest moments were scraping the frosting off the last of the cake and eating it before pitching the cake and tipping up the bottle of maple syrup like a jug of moonshine. Yes. I took a straight drink of the syrup.

I was 99% positive my horrible feelings all week were due to the overload of sugar.

It starts in the morning with my coffee. I don't think my coffee addiction is a caffeine thing because I drink only a couple cups of half-caff. No, it's the sugar. I drink my coffee with cocoa mix in it. I've gone down to a half packet, but still, I crave that sugar FIRST THING. Then I have some cereal--raisin bran with the sugary coated raisins or oatmeal, to which I add berries and a heaping teaspoonful of SUGAR. By 10 a.m. I'm hungry again so I have a Greek yogurt with HONEY or CARAMEL on the bottom. By then I've already also dipped into the M&Ms that we have for Hubby's trail mix or something else sweet. It continues all day long and as the day progresses, I feel worse and worse from the sugar crashes (and they take less time to happen, too, after I have something sugary.)

I HAVE to stop. My health and well-being are totally suffering from this. I can't drop any weight for one thing and have no energy to be a good mom to my boys or a good wife to my husband. I have been getting decent amounts of sleep. I go to bed around 9 or 9:30, get up briefly once or twice with Jordan and then get up at 5 or 6. I shouldn't feel SO tired all the time.

So, I'm going to do something about it. And it's going to be really really hard and it's going to really really suck and I'm probably going to feel like crap from sugar withdrawal all week, but I bet if I can make it through a week, I will feel so much better.

Here's my plan:
This week, starting right now, this morning, I'm going to stop adding sugar to things. None in my coffee. No honey in my tea. None in my oats. No M&Ms or Dove Dark Chocolate Promises or chocolate milk.

I will allow myself to have one yogurt a day. I've become a big fan of Greek yogurt, but I can't handle plain. They have something like 12-14 grams of sugar, but they also have that much protein, so that's good. By the way, I have discovered that the Yoplait light yogurts I was eating, which taste really yummy, have that many grams of sugar AND contain artificial sweetener. Why both?!?! Not cool. I am not going to have any artificial sweetener either this week. I try not to consume that stuff anyway.

So, other than the yogurt, the sugar I get this week will be in fruit or whatever. I guess I should not have any white breads or pasta or rice during this time, either, since that's essentially the same thing as sugar, and no alcohol either.

Each day, I'm going to blog what I eat, even if I slip up, and I'm going to keep track of how I feel during this process. Hopefully it goes up from where I've been!

Started off this morning with a banana and a 3.65-mile run. Even though I've been up since 3 (Hubby got up with Jordan, but I couldn't go back to sleep) I feel pretty decent. Am about to have some coffee with milk only.

Have a great week!