The Details

For now, the most challenging part of our challenge is actually deciding what we actually want to do. What is on and off limits? Unlike those people who give up buying from China for a year or who decide not to use credit cards anymore, we have less rigid guidelines. We’re not sure it’s realistic to eliminate all sugar, sugar substitutes, and sweeteners from our diets—although we know it’s been done—but we want to get as close as we can. We’ve got some initial ideas in mind, but we’re willing to change them as we go. Here’s where we stand today:

We don’t want to eat any of the following: Equal, Splenda, NutraSweet, Aspartame, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, Cane Syrup, Cane Juice

There are more strange sweeteners that I can’t even remember right now, but we don’t want to eat those either.

We don’t want to eat sugar (plain old sugar) in anything that we didn’t actually realize had sugar in it. This includes soups, canned beans, etc.

We don’t want to drink anything sweet, including fruit juices. We’ll stick to water, tea, and coffee.

We want to severely restrict any other sugar intake. If we decide we need to bake some bread, we may have to use a little sugar there, but that’s about it. And we’re holding off on even that for now.

On a non-sugar note, we also want to avoid chemical ingredients as much as possible. If it sounds like it was made in a lab, we’re not eating it. If we can help it.

We are not giving up beer. This is non-negotiable. We’ll try to limit it to a maximum of one beer a day for me, two for him.

So far, we’re one day in and life is going well. Andrew claims he feels better already. And maybe he does. Who am I to say?