Sugar is in almost everything and it seems impossible to avoid. Sugar is as addictive as nicotine and hard drugs. If you're like me and you consume excessive amounts of sugar, you probably know exactly what I'm talking about if you don't get your fix. While sugar is main ingredient of all of my favorite things to eat, sugar is also my worst enemy. Not only is sugar bad for your teeth, but it causes rapid weight gain, heart disease, diabetes, and puts you at risk for other health concerns.

My whole life I have never been the girl to count calories or say no to seconds or even dessert if I were hungry enough to participate in enjoying it. My family has always gone out to eat at least once a week and we always had a good variety of healthy items and junk food out our house. I have never known what I was like to starve or live a 100% healthy lifestyle/diet. But as an adult approaching my 30's in a few years, I have realized that now is the time for me to buckle down on my health and happiness before my metabolism takes a turn for the worse. My family members suffer from diabetes and other medical issues and if I can live a healthy and active lifestyle, I can prevent or at least prolong these things from happening to me.

Let me give you a bit of backstory to my life. As a kid, back when I had neighbors my age, I would always be outside playing with them. We would ride bikes, build forts, go on pretend secret missions and play sports, etc... but eventually I moved away and the place that I moved to lacked children my age. There were college kids, adults, elderly, and infants. I didn't have anyone to play with. I grew bored of riding my bike alone for hours every day in the summer. I grew tired of being alone.

One day I discovered the internet and online socializing. Forum sites, video games, chatting services, and social media became the source of my new friendships. The more I grew to love the internet, the less I went outside and played. Eventually in middle school and high school I spent my entire summers indoors, never stepping foot outside unless my mom made me go somewhere. In this time of my life, gym class at school was my only source of exercise and gym was only every other day.
After high school and I attended college, gym was no longer a requirement or source of activity for me and my vegetable lifestyle rose to an ultimate high. Not only did my exercise plummet to nothing, but my diet of unhealthy, greasy, and fatty foods rose. After meeting my boyfriend in college, and thousands of dates to restaurants and sharing many good and bad meals together, we developed our bad habits together. The fat on our bellies can be grabbed onto like a permanent inner tube inside of our skin.

We both know that we eat unhealthy. We also are aware that we should exercise. Most days we're pretty mindful of what we should or shouldn't eat but we're fatties on the inside. He loves his soda and snacks. I love my soda and snacks, especially donuts. I work at a grocery store so I am bombarded with a plethora of things to tempt me into poor decision making. The hardest moment is when the bakery is making fresh brownies, donuts, cookies, strudels, etc... and that really turns my inner fatty on and it's near impossible for me to turn it down. Sometimes I can go a few weeks without a donut but then something will set my stress through the roof and a donut simmers it down like a smoker needs a cigarette to get through their day.

On top of having poor discipline, nobody in my household likes healthy food except for my boyfriend and I. It's hard to enjoy a salad when the rest of your family is slamming down chicken wings, pizza, beer, soda, and donuts. So after a few days of staying on track and eating healthy, we break down and we join in. Suddenly one day of splurging turns back into splurging every night. Eventually I'll look back on my week and remind myself that I had a coffee with creamer every day, and I had 3 donuts that week, and 4 sodas, and 2 slices of pizza, and 4 mozzarella sticks, and then a burger with french fries, and the mac n cheese with fish sticks, and 1 yogurt, and some water. But I distract myself with the internet and my hobbies and these "food worries" disappear. I go to sleep and wake up with a fresh empty stomach ready to devour anything delicious that comes my way.

On Friday April 15th, 2016 I consumed 300 grams of sugar. The average woman is supposed to consume around 25 grams of sugar. I'm not 100% sure if that is just factoring in added sugars or just sugar period. If you're supposed to have 3 fruits/vegetables per day, I'm pretty sure those alone would set you over 25 grams of sugar before even including anything else you eat that day. I'd like to assume that they mean "added sugar" from processed items not including fruits and vegetables. I remember having coffee and creamer and I generally put excessive creamer in my coffee. That was 12g of sugar at least. Then I had a clementine and a banana. So now I'm probably hitting close to 25g of sugar and that was just breakfast. I get hungry a lot at work so I ended up also having a yogurt and some apple cider. The yogurt had 17g of sugar and the cider had 39g of sugar. That sets me at 68g of sugar by 10:30am. A couple hours roll around and my tummy tells me it's lunch time. So for lunch I had a deli sandwich which probably had sugar in everything on it and another cup  of the apple cider. I also had some no salt added chips, but there's a little bit of sugar in potatoes apparently so I'm well over 100g of sugar at this point. Later on in the afternoon I hit my first sugar crash. What did I fix that with? A kickstart, which is kind of like a mini energy drink and that had 12g or so of sugar. So it gave me some energy from the caffeine and ginseng and a little sugar high. I finally get home and I crash again. I'm home now and instead of hopping on the computer as usual, I tell myself I need to sleep. I wake up for dinner and I don't remember what we had, but I guarantee it wasn't healthy. I remember drinking some soda and drinking some alcohol. After my alcohol buzz was sort of fading, I got hungry for a snack. I went downstairs and I had a handful of chips, a little piece of cheese, a dill pickle, and a pack of tastycakes and as I think about it... I also had some fudge. As I was walking up the stairs, I was yelling at myself for eating so many snacks and that I shouldn't have done that. I get back into my computer room and I take a sip of soda and I look at the soda and it's like my entire day flashed by my eyes and I realized that I had 300g of sugar in one day. I took one more sip of the soda and set it down and didn't touch the rest of it for the rest of the night. I only drank water.

For the next few days I kept this "OMG WTF DID I DO" in my head, but at the same time, I tried to ignore it and kept eating and drinking my usual favorites like it wasn't a big deal. But once again, I kept feeling this constant feeling of being tired. I laid there thinking, omg... do I have diabetes? I got tested for diabetes a few years ago but the results came back negative and I would like to get myself re-tested just in case I do have it now.

A guy I know from work was telling me about how his mom was addicted to sugar and had sweets constantly and she ended up getting diabetes and having all of these health issues. He told me that he was heading down the same path and made a lifestyle choice to cut sugar out of his diet other than sugar that comes naturally from fruits/vegetables and he switch to organic non-gmo, etc... He said most of the stuff that he buys you can't even get at a regular grocery store, but at natural/organic stores. When I get my license this summer, I plan on making trips to these natural stores to buy products that I can't get at my store.

His story and his success inspired me to make a change in my life.

I'm on the first week of my new life of cutting sugar down and out of my diet. I'm buying products and foods that have natural sugars or low amounts of sugar. I'm trying to stay around or under 25 grams of sugar in a single day. I'm preparing my own meals separate from what my family is eating  and I'm making better decisions when I go out to eat at restaurants. Instead of getting my usual soda or fruity drink... I get water only. Instead of getting the deep fried sushi roll that gets drizzled in a sweet sauce, I'm getting wholesome and simple foods. When I have cravings for sweet things like donuts, candy, cookies, chocolate, etc... I'm reaching for fruit instead.

So far I am doing really good with my diet. Part of me wants to say that I can already feel a difference in how I'm feeling but I still feel tired all the time. So I'm going to have to look into what may be causing this tired feeling. I'm getting plenty of sleep and I always feel well rested. I'm drinking plenty of water and obviously I'm paying close attention to what I'm consuming, when I'm consuming it and how much sugar/sodium/contents are in the items. On top of dieting, I need to re-introduce exercising in my life. I had made an exercise vlog not too long ago and after that vlog I continued to exercise but work and art projects took over my free time and I threw exercising on back burner. It's time for me to dig up the grave and hold hands with my diet and exercising to achieve my goals.

I won't lie, I do want to lose some of the weight I've gained from being a fat ass. I'm mostly doing this so I can feel good again. I want to be healthy. I don't want to be in my 40's and have as many health problems as an 80 year old. I'm already convinced that I won't even live that long, but this is my chance to prove myself wrong.

I currently experience a lot of cravings, headaches, and feeling tired. I imagine this is simply just withdrawal from the EXTREME lack of sugar that I'm consuming. Sometimes my boyfriend is supportive with my diet and other times he likes to taunt me and kind tease me about things. I don't know if he's doing it to test me and my determination or if he's just being a jerk. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and say that it's both.

Here is a quick video I made of what I bought at the grocery store the other day.

If you have any suggestions on what kinds of foods, ingredients, drinks, and fun healthy food ideas that I could buy to keep myself on a positive track without getting bored of eating and drinking the same things, I would really appreciate any input. I do enjoy cooking but I don't have a lot of kitchen accessories or space to store a lot of ingredients or anything. I have access to most spices and things for recipes but since I'm literally the only person in my house eating this stuff, I don't want to make large quantities of things or take up too much space in the kitchen.

I will be recording my journey through this process so I can look back and see how I was and where I'll be in the future. I just weighed myself on my scale and the first time it said I was 163.1 lbs and the second time it said I was 170.9 lbs. I weighed myself 4 more times and they all said 170.9 lbs so I guess that's the right one. That's the highest I've ever weighed in my entire life. To give you an idea of my body. I'm 26 years sold and I have a 38D bust and I'm 5'4".

Stay tuned for more updates on my journey and I hope that I can get back down to 140 lbs. That's what I weighed in college. I think that's a reasonable weight. In high school I was 120 lbs. So somewhere between those two numbers would be PERFECT.