blessed sugar.
our family motto says, "we want healthy bodies and spirits," and it also says that rileys "search for the good in the world and find... blessed sugar!"
recently finn remarked, "how is it that some families can eat all the sugar they want and it doesn't bug them but we just eat a little and it all goes bad!"
evy piped up, "it's like that one video about the healthy guy who was running slow and all the other guys were passing him."
i think diet comparison across families is just a recipe for bad feelings. there are so many unknowns, and we're all just trying to figure it out!
our family has learned that we do best mentally and physically when we stick to a somewhat ketogenic diet. lots and lots of veggies, lots of healthy fats, a good amount of proteins from things like nuts and meats. fruit in moderation for deserts. whole grains in very small amounts.
have you ever tried living in a keto cottage when your friends abode in candy castles?
i tell myself i'm grateful for the intense mental health solutions, nay, miracles we've seen with diet modifications. and when i deeply ponder i am so thankful, really.
i'm thankful that when i see one child dramatically droop, the other rage in rebellion, or myself mope... i can also see the way that sugar has played a part in these sorrows. the reality of our vulnerability to processed sugars has become so obvious as to build important dietary confidence.
but it can still be very hard.
it's hard to explain to people who don't experience such volatile reactions to these "big hit" foods.
it's also hard to know how much to cut loose before a meltdown will smack us.
i often romanticize the homesteading era, when sugar was so costly and rare that a wedding cake was a big deal. now we walk into the grocery store on a tuesday morning and see $5 specials on chocolate towers of yum!
i'm really proud of ossi. he has developed a strength in sugar refusal that frankly amazes me. his bipolar disorder has been so helped through ketogenic eating, and he is very dedicated to this dietary treatment. he made a candy castle at christmas and left it untouched until the rest were picked clean. then he sold it to finn for a bargain price of $3 (finn probably would have given ossi his birthright if that was an option at the time).
a couple of years back, when we first cut added sugars and breads and anything processed we had a horrible time of it. but a couple weeks in we had strawberries and even now we all remember those strawberries like they were the best food we've ever tasted.
as we limit our sugar our family motto is especially true, i think.
we FULLY appreciate sugar.
which explains the crazed look in our eyes when we see you eating doughnuts!
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But we have one kiddo who wouldn't eat if not for that granulated friend of his. And we're not ready for the power struggle, but if I can get my issues (they're exacerbated by sugar intake) with mental and physical health to where I am willing to take in a sugar-starved tyrant, I know it will be the right thing for us. How did you handle withdrawal symptoms in your kids?
Sugar withdrawals... I can be so stubborn and this was one of those times. I actually counted all of the carbs in everything we were eating- even individually- for the fist few weeks and tried to keep us each under 50g a day (from fruit and veggies). We were incredibly strict when we went off of processed carbs and it felt terrible the first week. All of us had headaches. There was a lot of crying. Evy got a "keto" rash and everybody had major brain fog. I second-guessed myself a lot thinking, "this does not feel healthy" but I'd done a lot of research and I decided we could stick to it and see what happened, at least for a month.
I think it helped the withdrawal that all of us were in it together. We threw away or donated everything carby from our pantry/fridge so it wasn't around to be tempting. We also got some bento boxes and I'd fill them with lots of good stuff in the morning so that when we hit cravings we had food ready (not that it stoped any crying but at least I could say I'd done what I could and walk away).
Keeping an open discussion about the weird results was really cool. We played it like a science experiment. The first positive I noticed in myself was that I was thinking slower, in a good way. My thoughts came at a manageable speed, which I hadn't experienced in years. The first positive I noticed in my kids was that they didn't seem to get hangry anymore... I think we'd been living from carb crash to carb crash and I was constantly throwing crackers and fruit at them to keep them from melting down. The kids could go longer between meals and their mood would stay pretty steady.
The strength of our conviction that this was exactly what our family needed was the driving force in the change. The research Matt and I did started with a BYU speech given in July of 2018 by Benjamin Bikman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xefdEXfG9j0. After days and days of reading and watching and praying about sugar we were so prepared to let it go, even with all the whining.