Lent: Day 8
Celebrating one week on our healthy eating experiment for Lent!
Today was a fasting day for me so no cooking for me but plenty for the children.
When my children didn’t have their sugary staples to fall back on, they started binge-eating Go-gurt yogurt tubes and vanilla yogurt cups. Now that those are gone, they have switched to cereal (Special K, shredded wheats or Cheerios) and milk.
“Mom, there is nothing in the pantry and the fridge we like to eat,” my daughter informed me today.
We started brainstorming all the foods that we had that could be good snacks: peanut butter and jelly, cheese sticks, deli ham slices, quinoa, etc. My children are reluctantly eating the natural peanut butter. They have noticed the taste difference and they don’t really like it. My son keeps asking for Nutella. We are trying to sweeten the natural peanut butter a little with low-sugar jelly or honey for now. I don’t have a mutiny yet. They seem to understand that this is not forever and it is just until Easter. They also seem to stay motivated when I praise them for eating such healthy foods.
Today was a fast day for me and my husband joined me. Even though I only get to eat 500 calories today, I really look forward to my meal. Today’s fasting day was far easier than my first one on the healthy diet last Sunday. I didn’t feel the sugar shakes and I even managed to get my exercise in today.
*P.S. I was discussing the video I posted yesterday about insulin and fat burning with my husband. We were discussing “sugar shakes,” that shaky feeling that you get when you are hungry on a diet and can’t eat because you have run out of calories for the day. We were wondering if that feeling might be due to the body being unable to access food for the cells because no glucose is coming in via food and the insulin level is too high blocking the ability of fat cells to feed the body. If this is true, then perhaps the best course for sugar shakes is to wait them out until the insulin has time to fall and the body starts feeding on its fat stores. If anyone knows the answer to this please post a comment. I will have to remember to ask my doctor about this.