Chocolate Chocolate CHOCOLATE AAAAGH!

While my birthday was last Wednesday I did not really celebrate it at all.  My husband was sick that day and I had too much going on with kids to do much for myself.  Then Saturday I thought I had caught a break.  My older 2 kids were at their dad's, Kris went to work, and Autumn got invited to a friend's house for a couple of hours.  I was going to be......................ALONE!  I could do a few things around the house that I had wanted to get to, or I could sit on my butt and do nothing, or I could go for a walk, who knows!

Well that lasted for a very, very, VERY short time.  It was warm yet rainy.  Very rainy.  And because of the extreme cold we have had here over the past few weeks we had nothing but ice for that rain to fall upon.  Our basement, which is not finished off, got overwhelmed like everyone else's basement did during the flooding of 2011 that saw underground water tables rise to flood stage throughout Vermont.  Click HERE to view an album of photos from this historic and horrible event!  The water came up underneath my house and in through cracks in the floor of the basement.  We also had a time where it rained so hard in the winter that it came in through our large well window down there, breaking the seal of concrete.  That is easily remedied by sand bags.  This time the water was funneling off the road because of how the ice had formed and under my front porch, where there exists another smaller window.  That window could not take the ridiculous amount of water pressing into it and the seal broke and we had waterfalls. There goes my gym and photography studio. At least I found this incredible energy within myself and did things I did not know I could do, like practically heave a twin box spring up 14 stairs.  UP.

What does all this have to do with chocolate, you ask?  Well, because my husband and I had to spend all Saturday afternoon and evening trying desperately to save our basement and stop it from flooding worse than it already was, he was unable to calmly and slowly make me a cake that fit into my new dietary guidelines.  So instead he decided to make a from scratch chocolate cake, dubbed "The Best Chocolate Cake Ever" and found on addapinch.com  He did keep it mostly dairy free (although I learned after he put chocolate chips into the frosting), but in no universe was it SUGAR free.  Or even reduced.

We took it to my parents' house on the same day that he made it: yesterday.  The frosting was made with Coconut Milk instead of regular milk (it was supposed to have been made with coconut cream....) but was too runny so instead of frosting the cake with it I had the brilliant idea to pour it into dishes and we could dip the cake in.  Very fancy and decadent-like.  And easy to over eat the frosting.   I had already eaten probably 2 cups of Chex Mix which I did not realize had a stick of butter in it until I had gotten going on it.  Oh well, I just kept going.  Then we had the cake.  It really was THE BEST CHOCOLATE CAKE EVER, and the frosting "dip" was coconut-chocolate flavored which is one of my favorite things.  MY LORD.  I ate a very large piece.  And then had a tiny slice to help finish off the frosting.  Then I didn't eat dinner, but instead had another good sized piece about 4 hours after the first one.  SO GOOD.

However, even though it was so TASTY good I started feeling not so good.  After I had eaten the Chex Mix and first piece of cake my mom remarked on how tired I looked.  That's when I noticed I had started slumping and spacing out.  I felt very...blah.  I hadn't felt like that in 2 straight days which is a lot for me.  Then when I got home I entered the entire cake recipe into the MyFitnessPal recipe builder to find out just how badly I had hurt myself.  It was bad.  Real bad.  As demonstrated here in my sugar report:

My.  God.


MFP has this cute little button at the end of each day that you get to push that tells you how much you would weigh if you ate like that every day for 5 weeks.  Mine had me gaining just about 20 lb.  And that was without having any soda, ice cream, bread, dinner, etc.  In face I was only at about 17 g sugar until I ate that cake.  It really is eye opening.

Today I had a hard time getting out of bed.  I got dizzy when I woke up like before, and my stomach is not happy with me.  I'm also finding myself much hungrier than I have been.  I'm sticking with my dairy free today and as you can see above I have gone over my daily sugar goal and its only 3pm.  I will not be having any sweets for the rest of the day and hopefully dinner will be something like brown rice with tuna and black beans or something.

This really is a struggle.  All of our holidays and celebrations seem to rely heavily on sugar and it is considered rude and a bummer if you don't participate, especially in your own birthday party.  It was bad enough I had to turn down the Blue Bunny Birthday Ice Cream, which looked delicious.  

Sugar It Ain't Working Out or, There's Something About Dairy

For the past few years I have been using MyFitnessPal first as an app and then on my PC.  It's a great way to keep track of your food and exercise.  Yes, it takes time to enter what you are eating in, but if you are like me and you feel like poo all the time and you need to find out why it can be a great tool.

I have come to find out that something about dairy does not agree with my body.  Lactaid does not seem to help, neither does eating dairy items that do not contain lactose such as certain cheeses.  Even the small amount of ranch dressing I ate last night triggered intestinal...issues.  It may be a combination of things.  All I know is that no more creemees, no more cheese, no more yogurt.  Those have been staples throughout my life and so I have to develop an entirely new way of thinking about food.

My non-gastro symptoms over the past 6 months have been:

itchy flaky scalp
oily yet dry hair and skin
hair thinning
red bumps that form on my upper arms
dry feet
bloated stomach
bad mood swings, troubled thinking
flare ups of cystic acne anywhere on me
insomnia

Because I have a history of clinical depression I cannot pretend that it might not be from a history of eating poorly.   I have been taking liquid Vitamin D several times a month in 5,000 IU doses and that does seem to be helping with both the itching on my scalp (it has lessened but not disappeared) and with my depressive thinking.  I live in Vermont and its winter 80% of the year it seems!

I turned 35 on Wednesday of this week and that is a more important day to me than New Year's day so I have resolved that I will try eliminating things from my diet to see if that truly makes a difference.  And I'm not just saying that.  I have actually taken steps to do this.  Sometimes I talk about doing something but never get around to it.  Not this time.

So starting Thursday I eliminated dairy (except for a tiny bit of ranch which did cause intestinal distress!) and tried to halve my sugar intake.  I was doing great until I went to dinner with my friend Kim.  The food I ate was mostly sugar free, but then I automatically ordered a Coke.  I can't drink Diet Coke because it gives me UT issues (not infections, just pain) so I cut that out many months ago and haven't had a problem since.  But unfortunately Fountain Coke has 40g of sugar in a 12oz serving and that is what I had.  My sugar at the end of the day totaled 109 grams. Damn.

This is how I'm helping to supplement no dairy.  They taste a bit like butt after you have swallowed them.

Today I said, "Ok, I am not going to let that happen again."  I have eaten nothing but natural, healthy, mostly raw foods today.  However, my sugar total is up to 80 grams and I haven't had dinner yet.  My caloric intake is low, I need to eat more actually, but the sugar is off the charts.  I think I will just measure added sugar and not natural sugar because at this time I am not a diabetic.

My goal is 50 grams a day (still too much but way better) but I had almost reached half of that with my breakfast.  I had:
1 small hard boiled egg
1 piece of light toast with 1 tbsp of honey and 1 tsp cinnamon
1 clementine
1 cup energizing black tea
caltrate and adult gummy vitamins

these are quite tasty

Apparently the honey, while raw and full of goodness, is too much sugar.  But I don't want to give it up because honey and cinnamon has helped me coast through the sicknesses that have come and gone in my house with me only catching 1 head cold for 1 day!  That is unheard of for me.  Dairy substitutes I am using are Unsweetened Almond Milk and Earth Balance buttery spread.

I am eating snacks about 2 hours apart to keep from getting too hungry while my body deals with this diet change.  I'm not going to pretend I don't want to lose the 5 lb that have crept on since this time in 2012, so yes I am also eating lighter.  However, this is because most of the high calorie foods I was ingesting were dairy or sugar heavy.  I'm also switching my daily 2-3 "cups" (more like barrels) of coffee for 4oz cups of different kinds of tea.  Caffeinated in the morning, herbal in the afternoon and evening.  I can stand it straight but it isn't as delicious as french vanilla coffee with Almond Joy creamer in it.  Sigh.  I am not giving up my Friday morning coffee with my friend Becca though.  That will be my "binge" day.

Here is a chart I produced from MFP's site on my sugar intake.  Its over the last 90 days, and I wish I had entered more in the past couple of months or could go back even farther to see how high it was earlier in the year.

I mean really.  How am I not diabetic if that one back in November was my norm?

I'm slowly creeping down (the shortest bar is today, which is only half done) to my goal of 50.  I also wanted to try showing myself how much sugar I was taking in by dumping that many grams on a scale (I did a bit over 100g in this pic)

This is about 100 grams, which also equals 1/3 of a cup.  Yuck.

This is not an Aztec step pyramid.  This is 21 sugar cubes, which also equals 100 grams.

100 grams also equals 25 teaspoons.  

Seeing those equivalencies did do the trick for my brain to get a grasp of how much sugar I was pouring into my body.  My plan is to stick with how I'm eating for 7 days.  I'm a 3's kind of girl.  That means I give up usually after the third day, third week, or third month.  Today as I am writing this is Day 3 of my diet change.  

I did notice last night that I had way more energy, way less stomach pain, and fell asleep more easily than usual.  I will try to get up the nerve to take a before body pic so that I can see if any changes in shape take place.

Reflections.