Last meal of the 21 day sugar detox had zero sugar calories. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it was a 1200 calorie meal, all by itself. We went to Rancho Grande Cantina for dinner and I got 3 deep fried beef tacos, at 427 calories each (according to MyFitnessPal’s database). I enjoyed every calorie, and my body is thanking me this morning for breaking the drought. We ate a few chips and some of their guacamole before the tacos came out, too. We earned it!

I plan on continuing to use MyFitnessPal from now on. I find it very interesting to count the calories and nutrients that I am consuming, and it gives me another reason to love my phone and the internet. The data analyzing is fun to use, the charting is a great touch, because what is not to love about watching that weight and waist curve march down the chart?

Another great thing is finding out when your healthy living habits are spreading by your example. Last night we learned that someone close is now cutting sugars from all of their drinks. This is a huge first step, necessarily taken at the beginning of the sugar free journey. A person can cut out half of their sugar consumption by just not ever drinking another sweet drink. A Starbucks Latte has 25 teaspoons of sugar in it, a 20 oz Coke has 15, so eliminating these sources from your day makes your day a lot sweeter in every other way. The moral is MAKE YOUR OWN. Can you imagine spooning 25 teaspoons of sugar into any drink you made at home?  WTF!

So, from here, we continue down the road that has been working so well for us. I am immediately adding fruit back into my diet. I never was a daily fruit eater, but now that I have three weeks of no sugar under my belt, I am really craving the natural sweetness of fresh, ripe fruit.  I was able to eat bananas, and I did.  I really like bananas, and I plan on eating plenty of them, because they are such a treat now that every drink I take isn’t candy-sweet.

We are going to add starch back into our diet, because I love potatoes and brown rice is not anything like white flour in it’s effect on the body.  There are 195 calories in a cup of brown rice, compared to 455 calories in a cup of white flour.

I am going to make up a batch of my breakfast cereal that I love and miss, but I have learned that my egg and breakfast meat beginning to the day is just as fast and convenient and takes me to lunch without problems just like my cereal did. I already knew that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

So the total losses for the three weeks are three inches around the belly and seven pounds.  Two pounds per week is about as good as can safely be taken off, and we know this because I starved myself from the time I got food poisoning until yesterday.  My food journal app revealed that I was not consuming enough food to keep me out of starvation mode, which makes weight loss more difficult to achieve and sustain. A little bit of my own research leads me to think that starvation initially leads to energy coming from internal organs and some muscle, but that after three days, the liver is converting fat into ketone bodies that your brain and heart can use instead of glucose.  At any rate, the starvation days are over, and from now on we will be floating slowly down to my target weight of 130 pounds.

The purpose of the sugar fast was never to lose weight or inches.  The purpose was always in my mind to change the composition of my microbiome in my gut.  By starving the sugar-eating bacteria it encourages the rest of the bacteria to restore their numbers to a more normal natural level.  I am not so much interested in keeping fat from being produced by my body as I am in feeding the bacteria that compete with the natural, but not so beneficial yeasts that have been flourishing on what I have been flourishing on!

According to this article in the Washington Post:

…a growing body of evidence suggesting that naturally occurring bacteria and other microbes in the body, and possibly even viruses, can influence weight in ways that scientists are only just beginning to understand. Numerous studies are underway looking at the role of intestinal organisms in obesity, with a focus on how they extract energy from food and how this affects weight gain or loss.

And, if the idea doesn’t sound to reasonable to you, there is this experiment that was conducted:

Studies in mice have shown that intestinal microbes may contribute to weight gain. A novel experiment published this fall, for example, took gut bacteria from human twins — in which one was lean and the other obese — and transferred them into lean mice. The animals with bacteria from fat twins grew fat; those that received bacteria from lean twins stayed lean.

Of course, the Health Industrial Complex is working on a way to give you a pill that contains whatever the microbes create when they consume your food, or perhaps a pill that contains ‘colonies’ of the microbes that do this work.  However, the microbes are in you since birth and breastfeeding, passed on to you by your mother and environment (remember putting all that stuff in your mouth when you were a baby?) What you have done to those microbes is feed the competition, and starve them.  You don’t need a pill you need a healthy balance restored, which does not mean diet, it means NO SUGAR.