How I Got the Sugar Monster Out of My Life

You're a salt person or a sugar person.  It appears to be a universal truth.  For me, it's sugar.  I couldn't get enough of it, that is, until recently.

It didn't happen for me because I carefully constructed a master plan to free myself of this devil. It kind of happened by accident.  Here is my best attempt at summarizing the events:
1. Ate sugar every day for years and years.  Mostly after dinner when I was tired, but also at work when it would show up on the community dining table, which turned out to be almost every day. Always felt guilty about it because I knew it wasn't doing me any favors. Tried to resist, mostly unsuccessfully.
2. Joined Weight Watchers, again, in May 2009 and needed to stay within my daily and weekly points allowance.
3. Started purchasing (sadly, in volume) ice cream substitute "foods." (I use the term "foods" loosely here.)  Kept to products that were 2 points or less per serving.  Good ones are anything made by Skinny Cow http://skinnycow.com/ and many of the Official Weight Watchers ice cream products.
4. Ate 2 servings of these per day. Started losing weight. Let's call this my SUBSTITUTION PHASE.
5. As I lost more and more weight, I had less and less WW Points to use every day.  I cut out one serving of substitute ice cream per day.
6. Now for the REPLACEMENT PHASE. Read Eat to Live by Dr. Joel Fuhrman and started to question the ingredients in the "foods" I was consuming.  Decided to give dates a try.  Found them to be an extraordinary, natural way to satisfy my sweet tooth.  Started to eat some dates every night after dinner. Also began eating high volumes of nutritious food. Stopped craving the substitute ice creams.
7. Began to crave sugar less and less.  Didn't feel like I wanted to eat the dates every night, so I didn't eat them.
8. Lost more and more weight. Stopped craving sugar.  So I entered an ELIMINATION PHASE. Prefer the taste of real food desserts, like the "freezes" you can make in a VitaMix blender.
9. Now, when presented with something like candy, cake or cookies, I can ususally pass it up or take a taste and be done with it.  Sugary food just doesn't taste as good as it used to!


I made this up last night! It's so easy when you have a Vita Mix.

Pina Colada Freeze
makes a lot!

2 large frozen bananas
2 cups frozen pineapple chunks
6 medium dates
1/2 cup unsweetened, shredded coconut
1 cup (or more, as needed for blending) skim, almond, or soy milk
5 ice cubes
if you need to as you wean yourself off of the taste of sugary foods, you can add some stevia, agave syrup, honey or maple syrup

Place all ingredients in high speed blender and blend, using tamper tool, until the mixture is the consistency of ice cream.