Oh dear, David is experimenting on himself again.

There was a small drift of empty Mr Kipling cake containers in front of me. Not a half hour earlier I’d displayed all my usual tabl;emanners and decorum by falling into them face-first with a terrible gobbling noise, spraying crumbs and bits of icing everywhere. And it had been great. Mr Kipling does make exceedingly good cakes, all crammed with additives and flavourings and sugar and similar nice stuff and if you’re very lucky sometimes the occasional molecule of real fruit.
The sugar crash a short while later, on the other hand, was no fun whatsoever. I kept having to blink my eyes open as my body attempted to shut down, sleep and replenish itself as my delicate internal chemistry* had been thrown into utter disarray by the introduction of the best part of a half pound of pure sugar in the little more than a couple of minutes. Truth be told, I felt bloody lousy. I glared at Mr Kipling’s name, taunting me from the empty box.
You know, I thought to myself. I’ve really got to stop doing this.

So I did.

From time to time I get ideas in my head which turn into minor obsessions. I might decide to read the Bible cover to cover, or write a waltz**, or whatever. And from time to time I decide to do stuff just to see what will happen – and on this occasion I decided to give up processed sugar. Not as one of my sometimes berserk Lenten restrictions, but just to see if I could. It’s not something which has a set timetable but more an experiment to see how I get on, and how possible it is, and my usual ‘giving stuff up’ rule applies***. That was about six weeks ago.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this time it’s this: giving up processed sugar is pretty much impossible without more substantial changes to my life that even I’m prepared to make in pursuit of a meaningless goal. However, what it has done is make me look a very great deal more closely at what I eat. I’ll find myself standing in the supermarket looking at ingredients and thinking to myself Minestrone soup? What the blinking jiminy heckers does Minestrone soup need sugar as its fifth most plentiful ingredient for? and then putting it back on the shelf.
The most obvious effect was just that I’ve ended up eating less stuff. Not because I’m specifically dieting, but because it’s pretty much impossible to get any form of snack food that doesn’t have sugar in it, especially in Stevenage town centre at lunchtime. They even inject apples with HFCS there before selling them. As a result the occasional flapjack bar I’d munch on has been dropped, and whilst I normally make myself a salad for lunch if I forgot it didn’t matter because I could always get a sandwich from M&S or the local greasy spoon so that’s had to change as well. I’ve dropped cereals for breakfast and started making myself porridge instead. I’ve even made my own bread because it turned out that most bread you buy has sugar in it, but that took an entire morning and I’m a busy fellow so it‘s not something I’ll be doing often.

In truth I think normally eat pretty well anyway. I cook most of what I eat from fresh***** but to take that final jump into a ‘no sugar’ diet is probably beyond what I’m capable of. I can’t be arsed to make my own bread every few days, so Hovis and its permitted sugar gets to stay. And, frankly, if I’m eating chips you’ll have to pry my ketchup from my cold, head hands.

After a month or two, it’s difficult to see any major changes. I’m probably a fiver a week better off, just because I’m not buying a couple of bars of Green & Blacks and some Flapjack bars every week. I don’t get sugar crashes, but then again I got so few of those in the first place because gorging the crap out of Mr Kipling was something I did as an exception rather than as a rule. Instead the most noticable change is that I’ve found going to the gym much harder. Without sports drinks or a little chocolate booster on my way I don’t have the blood sugar sloshing round to power me through, meaning my body is having to rely on glycogen (of which I have little enough, having salads for lunch) or burning lard to power my gymming, which I suppose is good. My trousers do seem less tight******, but that might just be wishful thinking.

So, I've often heard that processed sugar is remarkably bad for me but in truth I'm not noticing much change before and after beyond taking more notice of the ingredients in the stuff I buy (and by crikey, there's some right old crap in food) and it feeling harder to keep throwing head kicks after an hour without a bit of a boost.

That said, I reckon Mr Kipling can stay on the verboten list.



*I am a sensitive flower, you know
**That one isn’t going as well as it might, btw.
***”Don’t be a jerk about it”~****
****I mean, it’s not like I’ve become a vegan or anything.
*****”I do thirty pushups a day and don’t eat fried food”
******I don’t have to breathe in sharply to do them up.