Roar

We are going to the zoo in the holidays and the children* are excited!  

It is a shame I can make a giraffe look short and stumpy; adjectives not usually used when talking about that animal.  Perhaps I should have bought a hippo costume...

*Possum is an elephant but she is at school so that photo will have to wait.

{Snapped}

I took some time for myself yesterday and charged up my camera battery and spent some time getting reacquainted with the idea of recreation time as a concept.  I went to town and sat in on a workshop for portrait photography which was good fun.  Today I took the recreation time concept one step further and we all went for a walk and 'adventure' along the creek; honestly, I don't know why we don't do this more often as it is such a great place.

Possum let me take a couple of pictures; however, Blue did not.  

Win some, lose some!

It felt good to have my camera out.  We have been busy and since I got an iPad I have not used my camera as much as I would like.  There is no denying that the photos on my blogs have suffered as a result so I am going to work on that from now on.

Sugar Free {Week 1&2}

I am lumping week one and two of the eight week programme together as the idea at this point is to just cut back on sugar so there isn't cold turkey style changes made to your diet.  I like the idea of this gentle approach but I don't need two weeks of it.

Last night we cleaned out the pantry and removed any food that had more than 6% of sugar; for future purchases I won't buy anything outside of this range from now on.  A lot of things went but I was surprised by how much of our staple pantry items got to stay.  The I Quit Sugar cookbook does not use many cereals such as rolled oats, pasta and couscous but I have left those items in too as the sugar content is fine and as I use them I will work on buying less in the future.

Next week is cold turkey week.  I am not making the children go cold turkey as it would rule out fresh fruit; I think their growing and active bodies will handle that much fructose but I will rule out dried fruit.  I did not realise that dates are 46.7% sugar and raisins are 69.1% sugar.  Read your labels!  Fresh fruit is not ruled out forever, just the first few weeks as you recalibrate your body to not crave sweetness.  Some fruits have less fructose so I will buy more of those for the children and for us too when I can eat them again.

I am very grateful that a lot of our cooking is safe to stay, this would never work if I had to give up milk, meat or coffee.  I feel very positive about this right now, especially after seeing how much sugar was in some of the foods I have been eating and even worse, feeding the children.

Sugar

My husband has always said that fat was not bad, it was sugar you had to watch out for.  Our generation have become experts at sugar production and it is in everything.

I first read about Sarah Wilson on a friend's blog, I wish I could remember which one.  Then another friend decided to sample a range of diets to see what worked for her and I thought again about sugar.  I don't think fat is the enemy and most diets target fat; so much fat free food is VERY high in sugar.

I bought the book 'I Quit Sugar' while I was in town and The Mr. Has read it and was caught muttering a lot; things like 'I agree' and 'that is what I said'.

We are going to spend the next little while getting to know how much sugar is in our pantry items and them in a couple of weeks we will begin this programme.  At this point I am a little worried by sourcing some of the ingredients in our rural town but I will just have to be organised and find a good online shop if needed.