Day 1 (officially)

So today I start. I had a few friends send me a messages last night saying "so what do you eat? and what do you feed the boys if you can't give them bikkies?"

Well, the simple answer is we eat food, and they eat bikkies. I make their bikkies for them. Thank goodness I learnt how to cook as a kid! But seriously, it is not that hard. I am following a lot of recipes in David Gillespie's Sweet Poison Quit Plan (thanks to Lizzie who did all the trial and error so the rest of us could benefit). The boys absolutley love ANZAC bikkies. Instead of sugar I use dextrose (glucose) which i get for a few dollars in the Home Brew section of my local Woolworths. Instead of golden syrup I use rice malt syrup, which still has that lovely golden colour. Other people have tried them and they taste pretty good. Admittedly I also cook with gluten free flour (we don't have wheat flour in the house as my husband has Coeliac Disease) so they do taste slightly different but my kids don't know the difference.

So today, I am having a bowl of porridge for breakfast. If I really feel the need to sweeten it I could use Stevia, but I actually learnt a long time ago that porridge tastes better in its natural form with a bit of milk on it. Lunch is a nice big salad with a boiled egg chopped into it, a bit of avocado and some full fat mayo. Dinner would normally be steak, fish or chicken with salad or veges. Scott and the boys would add a potato or some rice depending on what we have. I am still trying to limit my  complex carb intake to early in the day.

Snacks during the day are a piece of fruit (eg banana, kiwifruit etc) and some nuts (almonds mostly, since they are a favourite).

The concept is quite simple in a scientific sense. Sucrose (the sugar we add to most of our food) is made up of one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose. [I could reference my year 11/12 students' biology textbook here for you, or you could take my word for it as a Biology teacher.] Our bodies have a need for glucose and recognise it when we eat it. We have various systems in place to either use it or store it appropriately. Our bodies don't know what to do with fructose. In its natural form in a piece of fruit is comes packed in fibre and there is some suggestion that the fibre helps the fructose move along (nothing to see here style of stuff....) and leave our body. In a concentrated form (ie anything other than packed in fibrous fruit) it runs around our blood stream being ignored by all our sugar recognition systems because it is not "visible" to them. So after a little while it has a little rest... wherever it wants... and turns into little fatty acids.... which do a little damage (actually a lot).

We had a fifth birthday party on the weekend. I made cupcakes using dextrose instead of sugar. I made icing from butter, dextrose and a little bit of gelatine. Every kid except one (and all the adults too) hoed into them. The one kid - he is not much of a cake eater. The people who were there are a rather honest lot and would have told me if they were no good. There were none leftover. Speaks for itself I say.

It is easy to make small changes. You just have to be prepared to change the way you do things. I bake more now than I have in a long time and I have to say, Sunday afternoon was, although busy, a very relaxing time for me making food for my family to eat this week at school and work.

Cya!