No sugar please!

I’m into week two of my no sugar challenge. I’m not going to lie, it’s been a killer to stick to it.

If you’ve joined me on my journey you will know sugar is in everything. I’m still eating fruit and natural sugars but no vino and no chocolate is hell on earth. It’s like swimming in the ocean and trying to avoid swallowing seawater.

If you didn’t see Sugar Crash on RTE One this week I urge you to watch it back on the player. What shocked me most about the documentary was how we are being tricked into thinking some of our food is healthy when in fact it is rammed with sugar.

I’ve already found the key is to make everything yourself from scratch. It seems the food industry is keen on using any name other than sugar to trick us. There are 50 different names for sugar and here are just some of the more obscure; Barley malt, cane juice crystals, crystalline fructose, dextran, dextrose, diastase, ethyl maltol, evaporated cane juice, maltodextrin, maltose, mannitol and panocha.

I mean you’d need a degree in chemistry to cop that these are in fact sugar, the cheek of it! A handy trick is to freeze grapes and suck on one or two when you are watching the telly at night, they curb the sugar cravings and are like healthy mini ice-pops.