One more week until we’ve successfully completed our 8-week sugar detox! Time has moved so quickly. It seems as though we just started this experiment, and yet it’s almost as though it’s been part of our lives for a long time. Isn’t that how life works?
Quick stat report: I’m down a few more pounds to below what I was when I got pregnant with Martin. I still have some to lose in order to be able to fit into all of my clothes, but I’m getting there. Exercise is super important, and I have more energy and am happier on the days when I exercise and the day immediately following (but I already knew this). As much as exercise is important, diet is more important. The days I eat really well (a lot of produce and protein) always include a better mood and more energy.
Because we had The Not Wedding in Charlotte this past week (I feel like I’ve been talking about it a lot, but it seriously took over our lives for a week or two), Wednesday and Thursday were kind of throw away days. We didn’t eat dessert or intentionally eat food with sugar in it, but we did eat on the fly a few times and hoped for the best by eating at Pure, a farm to fork organic pizza place in Uptown Charlotte’s 7th Street Market.
We also ate dinner with our friends, David and Kristin, on Friday night. We grilled out pizzas, and I made the dough. I thoroughly intended to do a blog post about the pizza dough and our amazing pizza, but after taking pictures of the dough, I dropped the ball and got caught up in girl talk with Kristin when Tyler took the pizza out to the grill. So I have no completed pictures of grilled pizza, and there wasn’t any leftover, naturally, so there will be no post. David and Kristin are so amazing though because they bought special ingredients in order to make our meal sugar free. David makes killer pimento cheese and got sugar-free ingredients to make it so we could eat it, and Kristin made salad dressing without sugar or honey, which was a giant plus for Tyler and me. We ended up eating pimento cheese pizza and pizza with sauce, slices of mozzarella, arugula, and chicken sausage. We had Greek salad as well. All in all, it was a great celebration of no sugar and David and Kristin’s 1st Wedding Anniversary, which was yesterday. We busted out the extra bottle of champagne we got from The Not Wedding to celebrate.
Other highlights from our 7th week of no sugar included eating Meffins for the first time. Meffins are meat muffins, a term from Sarah Wilson’s I Quit Sugar book. They include eggs, meat, and veggies, and they are absolutely delicious. We’ve been eating them for breakfast and snacking on them all week. We also ate the yummy pork chops & stuffed green peppers pictured above. Tyler was in the mood for pork chops, and I whipped up quinoa-stuffed peppers in no time. No recipe, just quinoa, cheese, and avocado. I’d love to have added black beans, but we didn’t have any.
We also ate a little bit of fruit! Twice this week we made Halloumi cheese with apple slices. We browned both in a pan together and sprinkled on some cinnamon. It was simple and delicious. The crazy thing about Halloumi cheese is that it doesn’t melt and is perfect for grilling. It’s delicious and salty and went well with the Granny Smith apple we had. The most ridiculous thing? Tyler and I each ate 1/4 of an apple per serving, so 1 apple lasted us the whole week. Because it was a dessert, we only had a small portion, and mixing the apple and cheese together made us full more quickly. It was a perfect amount of sweetness. We loved it.
And randomly, this Shrimp & Grits recipe looks delicious. Here we go, Week 8!
