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You’re ready to start a sugar detox. Maybe you’re dipping your toes in with a week without sugar, or maybe you’re ready to dive in for a whole month. No matter how long you choose to detox from added sugar for, and how you define your actual rules, it’s important to prepare your kitchen, your pantry, and with it your mind for the challenge. Because it will be a challenge and the more sugar you can ban from your kitchen beforehand, the easier it will be.
There is added and refined sugar in almost every single processed food. There is sugar in things you’d never think it would be in. Frozen vegetables and salad dressings are two examples that often surprise people. Read the labels of everything you have in your kitchen. Look for all the different words sugar is disguised as including dextrose, fructose, glucose, corn syrup, maltose and others. You can find long and inclusive lists online.
What will often trip you up is all the little extra things we use to cook and prepare meals. This could be things like mayonnaise and salad dressing, but also spice mixes and seasonings. If you use one of those little packets to make your tacos or chili, you may want to find either an alternative without added sugar, or better yet, make your own. Start looking up alternatives and recipes so you’re ready when it’s six o’clock at night and you’re hungry.
If you’re currently relying on a lot of processed and ultra-processed food, and aren’t cooking much from scratch, it may be time to work on those cooking skills. If you can make your own seasoning mixes and salad dressings for example, or cook a pot of soup from scratch, you’ll eliminate a lot of added sugar from your diet.
Start working on those skills and try out some new recipes while you prepare for your sugar detox. It will make your life so much easier. It will also make sure you have what you need to do this. For example, you’ll have a small jar or bottle ready along with olive oil, vinegar, and spices to mix up and store a quick salad dressing. Or maybe you find yourself buying a waffle iron to make waffles from scratch instead of popping the frozen one in the toaster in the morning.
Last but not least, make room to prepare and store lots of whole foods. Keep cut up fruit in a bowl in the fridge instead of cookies in the pantry. Snack on raw veggies instead of chips and pretzels. Have storage containers on hand so you can make home-cooked meals ahead of time to replace the processed and prepared food you’ve been gravitating to. You’ve got this!
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