Betrayed! Or Sugar Free Challenge Days 4, 5, and 6

Friday was day four of my sugar free challenge.

I noticed that Laura still had a slice of apple pie from New Years Eve in the refrigerator and Aubrey had this big, beautiful chunk of chocolate. I would never eat it, but I was tired of it staring at me, taunting me, every time I looked into the refrigerator. So, I asked them to eat it or somehow get rid of it already! 

They had no problem with my request, which I am sure was one that was odd to hear from me, "Eat your dessert already." I usually ask them not to eat too many sweets. Or to save some for "future you"  but I am sure they were glad my tune had temporarily changed.

Friday is "Pizza Friday" in the Howder household. We make our pizza dough from scratch. Aubrey even grinds the wheat for it in our wheat grinder. She made sure to leave out the teaspoon of sugar that we usually add in with the yeast and water. I didn't notice any difference in taste or texture. So, it really isn't necessary to have it after all.

Saturday was day five. I found carbs to be satisfying when the sugar cravings came, so I thought I would try some oatmeal. I usually love oatmeal! I thought I would add some peanut butter and raisins. Yum! But, I checked the label on our peanut butter -

How could you peanut butter!?! This was the peanut butter we had chosen to avoid hydrogenated oils but we had not ever thought about sugar . . .

I added almond butter and unsweetened chocolate powder instead of the peanut butter - and I still went with the raisins. The results? Terrible. I mean absolutely horrible. I ate the whole thing. I am not sure why. I angrily glared at the peanut butter as I ate it. 

Dinner was great. We had bean burritos with homemade salsa and tortilla chips. And that was all for day five.

Sunday, today, was day six and church day. We went to church and it was chock full of some beautiful temptation.

Donuts

Mints

I almost grabbed a breath mint just out of habit. What am I supposed to do about my breath? I thought about carrying around mint leaves and chewing on the leaves.

And I don't know if it is because I am not having any sweets but my son smelled so much like chocolate after church. I asked him WHY he smelled like chocolate. He said it was because he had been eating chocolate. It was in his cookies. Insightful.

I came home from lunch and was really hungry. I ate my usual giant salad. I hopped up to toast some Sandwich Thins to have along with it.




When I decided to take a glance at the back. 





"Sugar" was clearly one of the ingredients.

Bummer!

I sat right back down to eat my salad . . . 

. . .  I read the ingredients to the Sabra Hummus - "organic chickpeas, water, organic tahini . . ." good, no sugar. Yay!

How about these multigrain tortilla chips? . . . . 
organic whole ground corn, organic this, organic that, organic bla, bla, bla. . . and there it was " organic evaporated cane sugar."

Fancy sugar but still sugar. NOOOO!

If you read the label it says zero grams of sugar per serving but the ingredients tell a different story.

Well, these enlightening details came too late. I had some of these chips with my dinner the night before. It was completely unintentional and I am not sure what to do with this. Should I count it as starting back at day 1? Should I continue on and pretend it never happened? I don't know. I discovered a few other things we use have some hidden sugar as well. The Ragu my husband likes to buy for example (I should have already known because I would alway complain it was too sweet). Which is why I had a separate dinner from the rest of the family tonight. Apparently this challenge is going to be harder than I thought it was going to be.