Eat This! How To Survive Sans Flour And Sugar

What exactly does a life without flour and sugar look like? Read on.

Someone in work heard me rattling off everything I was eating for the day on the phone and looked at me like I had six heads. I was doing what I do almost every morning: Tell my OA sponsor what my food plan is for the day.

Mood music:

It sounds extreme. But it’s what I have to do to stay well. Going over it with my sponsor keeps me on track.

I’m often asked how I can deal with life without those two ingredients, and my answer is that I couldn’t deal with life WITH those things. People think this eliminates any joy in eating, but that’s not the case for me.

When someone asks what’s left to eat when I skip those things, the answer is quite a lot. Here’s what my food plan looks like on a typical day:

BREAKFAST:

8 ounces of a protein, typically Greek yogurt or ricotta cheese

3 ounces of Grape Nuts or oatmeal

8 ounces of berries

LUNCH:

–12 ounces of vegetable

–2 ounces of potato or brown rice

–4 ounces of protein (meat)

DINNER: Same as lunch.

A few notes:

It’s pretty difficult to eliminate every last drop of flour and sugar from your diet. There’s natural sugar in fruit, for example, and there are trace amounts of flour in a lot of things, including the Grape Nuts I eat at breakfast.

For me, the key is to avoid the highly enriched stuff (the white flour and sugar).

For those who find this diet bland, I say it’s all in how you make it. I can take all the individual ingredients of lunch and dinner and stir fry it. I add a lot of spices like hot pepper sauce. I use a lot of olive oil.

I also drink all the coffee I want (cream, no sugar).

This plan also doesn’t mean I can’t eat out. I have to when I travel on business, for example. No flour or sugar actually makes eating out simpler: No flour and sugar automatically takes a lot on the menu off the table. That makes it easier for me to make the right choices. I usually go for salads with meat in it and rice or potato on the side. I don’t put the restaurant food on a scale. Breaking out the little scale in a restaurant would be anti-social, in my opinion. The key there is to keep eating out to a minimum.

Carrying on this way keeps me from binge eating. It’s not perfect, but it beats the alternative.

One Reply to “Eat This! How To Survive Sans Flour And Sugar”

  1. It’s funny – or grimly ironic – how not-unnatural I find the idea of ordered eating. Not for me, mind you, but because my older daughter has food allergies – eggs and almonds. My younger sister also had/has a lot of food allergies. Now my dad has high blood pressure and has a diet centered around sodium avoidance. At any given time, I’m planning ahead for at least two and sometimes four or five health-related food factors, and that’s not including the generally accepted guidelines for kids’ food at my daughter’s school (it’s not a nut-free zone, but they really prefer it if you leave the nuts at home. So we do.).

    The only time I get nervous is, of course, when we eat out, for fear of accidental exposure for our daughter. In our corner of Melbourne, there are a lot of vegan restaurants, which help, but I’m only truly comfortable at a few, select places that know us. Funny.

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