My Self-Imposed Sugar Sweets Ban

After reading a post over at Ridiculously Extraordinary about not drinking alcohol for 30 days, I’m strongly considering my own self-imposed ban, starting on February 1st. Mine would not be of alcohol (seeing as how I don’t really drink in the first place), but of sugar-based sweets.

You see, my sweet tooth is something fierce. I inherited from my father a weird need to have something sweet at the end of every meal. If I don’t, the meal won’t feel finished and I won’t feel satisfied (which can often lead to further snacking), and sometimes it’s even as if my mouth feels and tastes strange until I have something sweet.. It doesn’t have to be something substantial, either: it can be something as small as two or three gummi bears. I have to have something sweet after a meal, and though non-sugar-based items like fruit or tea will work just as well, I tend to gravitate toward more “traditional” deserts. I suspect that over the years, this habit has added more than a few inches to my waistline.

I want to see if I can cut out sugar-based sweets for a few reasons.  Among them are:

1. Weight loss. Sugar is one of those annoying foods that has an inordinate amount of calories per gram, without providing much in return. Cutting the sugary snacks out of my life should help to reduce my caloric intake without having to do much decreasing of the amount of food I eat. Admittedly, I don’t actually have too much of a caloric intake problem – on an average day I eat about 1200 calories (1600 on a high day, 800 on a low day) – but sugar is largely unhealthy calories, and those are what I have been trying to cut from my diet.

2. Health. A lot of the candy I eat is pretty bad for me. I have a singular addiction to gummi-type candies and have probably eaten more reconstituted horse hooves (gelatin) than I ever care to think about. I’m a stickler about healthy, natural food in the rest of my life, and maybe it’s time for me to stop putting quite so much of such a highly processed food into my body.

3. Self Control. I generally have better self control than your average person, but I feel that even when you’re good at something, there’s always room for improvement.  I definitely could use some work on my self control when it comes to food, so I feel this will be a good personal development experiment.

Does anyone want to join me?  If you have a vice that you want to try and cut out of your life for 30 days, let me know in the comments and I’ll link to your own blog post when I start in February.