5 Things That Happened When I Went on a Low-Carb, Low-Sugar Diet with My Boyfriend
This article was written by Stephanie Eckelkamp and provided by our partners at Prevention.
Yeah, I eat pretty damn healthy. But I’m only human. Every once in a while when there’s a birthday at work, I eat a cookie. Sometimes two if I’m stressed. Then that cookie reminds me, wow, refined sugar is delicious! And, also, that I love apple fritters. Then the next morning, I might buy an apple fritter. And so on, down the rabbit hole.
Earlier this month, in particular, I was feeling a little meh about my eating habits—my fritter count was higher than usual, and I’d done this experiment where I ate like my boyfriend for a week. He doesn’t always have the most stellar dietary habits, guys. So I was in need of a little nudge in the opposite direction.
But I wasn’t about to go it alone. So I enlisted my BF to be my partner in a two-week sugar detox. Now, rest assured, this wasn’t a detox in the annoying sense of the term—no juice cleansing, no fasting, no weird lemon-cayenne water sh*t. After consulting several seemingly sane diet books, we ended up taking this approach: no grains; no packaged food products with added sweeteners; no table sugar, natural sweeteners, or artificial sweeteners; no alcohol; no beans. We could only eat one piece of low-sugar fruit per day (e.g. a green apple), and were somewhat limited in our choice of uber-starchy veggies (e.g. no white potatoes). But we could eat loads of most veggies, along with eggs, fish, meat, nuts, nut butters, seeds, plain yogurt, and cheese.
The goal was to reset our palates and be able to come out of this thing with the ability to be satisfied with healthy, whole foods, and to truly only eat treats in moderation—and without jumping on the first fast train to fritter town. Here’s how we fared.