Quitter Chronicles: #3 : The Slow Purge

Slow Purge.

After spending a few days making mental notes of all the foods I ate that contained refined sugar, I decided the next step would be to begin to slowly purge my house of this sweet menace.  All those foods in my pantry containing sugar would have to go.  But I neither wanted to toss them nor give them away – they cost me a lot of money, and there were a lot of them! 

In my mind, the first logical step was to avoid purchasing anything containing refined sugar – at least significant quantities of such items.  I stopped buying granola bars, pasta sauces, crackers, salad dressings, etc.  By refraining from adding sugary foods to my stockpile, I figured it would be much easier to focus on ridding my cupboards of the stuff that was already there.

The second step was to use what I had.  I began to widdle away at the banana bread and muffins I’d so wisely frozen.  The sweet and sour sauce I bought for emergencies went into a stir-fry.  The remaining granola bars got packed in my work snack stash.  Even the sausage in my freezer went in a quiche, and the Italian sausage stew I made served it’s purpose as a convenient meal.  I even managed to finish off my Swiss Miss hot chocolate in the month of July.  And yes, I will confess that I binged on “m&m’s” that I had bought on sale after Easter. 

At first this process seemed really daunting.  I had a lot of sugary stuff to get rid of and was mildly afraid of putting on a few pounds in my efforts to eat it all before I started my cleanse.   Seemed counterproductive.  But, first of all, I don’t think I ended up eating much more sugar in those weeks than I normally did when I wasn’t concerned about sugar.  And secondly, as the weeks passed, the task became more encouraging because I saw that my supply of sugary stuff was dwindling markedly. 

In the end I did end up giving away a bunch of stuff like raspberry jam and Marshmallow Fluff.  And, sadly, I ended up donating a good amount of Cadbury eggs and Hershey Kisses to my coworkers.  But with a few days remaining before my scheduled start for my sugar cleanse, my pantry and freezer were clear of high-fructose corn syrup and white sugar.