My wife told me she wanted to keep sugared stuff like sweets and cakes from our child as long as possible and realistic. That way it's much easier to give our child healthy food, since he or she doesn't have sugar sugar on his/her mind. Our (future) child cannot miss something if it doesn't know it exists, right?

Before I go further: this doesn't mean our child will not have any sweets until it's 16 or something like that. We just want to keep it out of the viewfinder as long as it's reasonably possible. We live in an world that's practically totally sugar-coated, so it's better to learn our child how to cope with that fact. One way to do that is to show that leading a healthy lifestyle doesn't mean that you'd miss something.

So I think that it's a great idea, but that that would mean that we should review our eating habits as well. We already eat healthy, but now we had to make that extra mile to ban sugar from our house.

So we're both cutting down our sweets consumption until it will be close to zero. I already was relatively successful in reducing my sugar consumption, but I always had problems with that last mile. Every day I munched away something small, and at parties I had (and have) a real problem with resisting all that tasty stuff on the table. And although many people would be content with that amount of sugar everyday, I still want to be totally free of products that obviously contain a lot of sugar.

What I already did to cut down sugar intake before totally quitting sugar:

• Replacing sugared drinks
  In my youth I only drank sugar rich drinks like Coke, Tonic, 7Up and juices. I rarely drank water, although you should drink 2 liters a day. And that 2 liters can't be replaced by other drinks like juices, tea or coffee. Caffeine, for example, is a diuretic so it will only accentuate the symptoms of water loss. And juices are so rich of sugar, in contrast to your body, that it will attract water from your body than the other way round. So your body needs that pure water to keep the body run smoothly.
  I didn't like tap water, so I switched to bottled soda water. The soda makes it taste really good. After that I switched to tap water, because that's cheaper. I still drink juices, but keep the consumption to 2 glasses a day.
• Don't have sweets in your house
  I started to anticipate my weak moments. To make sure I didn't grab the easiest food around, I had to make sure it wasn't there. Seems easy, but you also have to have some sweets for visitors. So in the end it was me who ate most of the stuff we had bought for visitors.
• Have alternatives available
  Sometimes you just have hunger, or want to eat something small. So I made sure I had alternatives available: apples, bananas, carrots, etc. On top of that I made sure that I had these alternatives as easily available as possible. If you don't see that bowl with fruit everyday, it will still be full at the end of the week.

That's it for now. Soon I'll post part 2 of this post

Some links:

• Why drink water
• Two Litres a Day Helps You Think and Play

Labels: food, health