i love a festive drink as much as the next basic bitch, but my god - you don't realise how much junk goes into those bad boys until you sit down and really assess what sort of nonsense you're putting into your body. in the wake of my complete and utter unhappiness with how i am currently looking, i took the advice of a couple of my pals, and looked into slimming world. not in the sense that i am "on plan" and going to meetings, because - lord knows i don't have the time for that, rather i am simply taking stock of what is in my daily routine, and removing all the unnecessary badies from the menu.
for example - i had no idea how much sugar i was consuming until i kept a food diary. four teaspoons of raw sugar in my 8-cup cafetiere at work. every. single. day. not to mention the two teaspoons of raw sugar in my fruit and fibre cereal every morning at work - and at home. i mean, that's six totally un-needed teaspoons of sugar before lunch time. and that's before we take into account the biscuits and cakes and snacks that circulate the office almost-weekly at work, and my god: that's a lot of sugar. so, first things first: i cut out sugar.
yeah, i cold turkey cut out added sugar. i stopped eating biscuits. i stopped eating chocolate. i stopped adding sugar to everything that went in my mouth, just like that. and that first week? it was torture. not because i wanted to eat it, though. actually, i barely craved sweet food at all, and instead wanted salted things for some reason, but it was hard because of the headaches. those detox headaches are really badddd, man. so bad that i had to get ultra-strong painkillers to stop myself seeing spots and wanting to be sick from them, bad. and they hardly dissipated even then. detox headaches take time, and i stuck it out, and felt better for it. especially as because, while i was detoxing, i was also hacking coffee every morning to make my body think it was still getting what it wanted. how? read on.
what i started doing was adding other sorts of sweeteners to my morning drinks, to continue to enhance the flavour of the coffee, without adding real sugar. i stopped using regular milk, instead choosing an almond or soy milk, as those are already nuttier in flavour, and give the coffee a slight edge too. i would warm the milk in the microwave first, with a teaspoon of ground cinnamon mixed through it to give the milk that lovely, festive flavour, and i would then pour the freshly pressed aeropress or flavourful gourmesso or nespresso pod coffee (depending on which kitchen i was in that day!) into the warm milk, to make it more like a latte, and give it a minute to blend before absolutely smashing the christmas-flavoured coffee back while humming christmas songs at my desk.
not a single added teaspoon of sugar has passed my lips in more than two weeks now, as far as coffee is concerned. i allow myself one teaspoon in my porridge in the morning (with some more of that beloved cinnamon), to flavour what is otherwise a thick bowl of cardboard, but that's it. my days of throwing raw sugar at everything have thankfully come to a close (as have the days of detox headaches), and i can't tell you how much better my body feels. i haven't lost any weight as such, i don't think, but i feel a lot better, which is the main thing at this stage. i was feeling bloated and sluggish, and i couldn't figure out why. sugar, man. sugar. who knew?
*post written in collaboration with gourmesso, but all truths are my own! coat c/o j.d. williams.
