This week’s carnival hostess is Donielle from Naturally Knocked Up, who blogs about how diet affects fertility. Be sure to catch all the past topics and upcoming themes here. Here’s Donielle:
My Personal Story with Sugar
My entire life I’ve eaten sugar, and lots of it. Throughout my childhood I honestly don’t remember a day that went by without some sort of sweet thing to eat. Each and every snack we ate throughout the day was laden with the white stuff; cookies, brownies, pudding, Jello, fruit snacks, Little Debbie snacks, and on and on. We had dessert after dinner each night without fail.
When I hit my teen years it got even worse. I now had my own money for buying any snack I desired and usually hit the country general store to grab a coke and candy bar each day on my way to work. I worked at a shaved ice place (like snow cones but softer) and the amount of sugar we poured into the syrup now makes me teeth hurt! But yet, I ate plenty while I worked. Extra syrup please.
The coffeehouse that came next was no better since I had easy access to the flavored syrups and since my parents owned it, I drank as much as I wanted. I got married, got a ‘real’ job and you know what? Women love to bring candy to work and set it out. Somehow it’s normal, and so I was constantly bombarded with sweets at work.
At home I regularly ate at least a half a gallon of ice cream each week. I was constantly buying bags of candy, drinking a case of pop a week, and kept up the dessert tradition I had learned as a young child. On many occasions I actually ate entire bags of chocolate chips or jars of frosting in one sitting. But because I was within 10 pounds of my ideal weight I never thought it was an issue. Sugar was good, and if you weren’t trying to lose weight it was fine to eat as much as you wanted. Right?
More Sugar, Fewer Cycles?
Here’s where things start to get really personal. I rarely got my period as a teen, sometimes going a year or more without aunt flow making her appearance. In 2003, at 22 years old, I was finally diagnosed with poly cystic ovary syndrome and told that I would have to take medication/birth control pills for the rest of my ‘menstruating’ life and use more medication to conceive.
As the time finally came when my husband and I wanted to start our family, I knew I would have issues getting and possibly staying pregnant. So I started to eat better and cut out many of my favorite junk foods. After many, many, many months, we finally conceived our son, born in 2006. But after he was born I fell into old habits again.
While I had cut back on my daily ‘junk’ food consumption, sugar was still prevalent in our house. I vividly remember my husband and I polishing off a half gallon of ice cream one night. And I didn’t think twice about it.
What did cause me to think twice was when I started to feed my little one solid foods. I started reading, and researching, and found more and more information regarding the downfalls of eating sugar. The issue of fertility kept coming up and caused me to be more intrigued.
Much to my husband’s dismay, I did a 180 in the way I ate and prepared my foods!
While sugar consumption was just one part of that, I believe it was one of the most pivotal and biggest changes I made and I noticed the difference in my mood and also migraine frequency within weeks.
And you know what? Within months after I cut out refined sugar, my cycle normalized and I began ovulating regularly. For the first time in my life I could look at the calendar and know, almost to the day, when I would ovulate. It was such a freeing feeling knowing that my body was finally working in the manner that God created it to!
The problems with sugar
There have been many, many books written about the dangers of sugar. Every doctor, dietitian, and dentist (conventional or natural) recommends cutting back on sugar consumption. It’s one ingredient that no one tells you to eat more of. And yet we consume more sugar now than ever.
Sugar’s in a very large amount of processed foods, our beverages, salad dressings, even our vitamins, and we’re bombarded with it at every turn. On average we now eat approximately 158 pounds of sugar per year, per person. That’s more than any time – ever – in the history of mankind. In terms of white sugar, that comes out to about a half a cup (or about 24 teaspoons) of added sugar to our diets each day!
So what’s so horribly bad about it? Let me give you just 5 of the countless ways sugar can damage our bodies.
- It’s addictive. Just like a drug, we get addicted to the way sugar makes us feel. It stimulates the release of dopamine (a feel good chemical) and we like that. We get a quick mood booster and learn to depend on certain foods to help us feel better. Ever dive for the cookies or ice cream when you get in a fight with your spouse?
- It affects our fertility. Sugar causes a rush of insulin within our bodies, and that rush causes quick spikes and then quick drops of our blood sugar. Because insulin is a hormone, it affects our other hormones, causing a cascade of issues surrounding imbalanced hormones. When we have to much sugar in our blood, our livers turn the excess into a lipid, which then shuts down a gene called Sex Hormone Binding Globulin (SHBG), which reduces the amount of SHGB protein in the body. This particular protein plays an important role in the amounts of testosterone and estrogen available for the body to use. It also depletes the body of vitamin B which is an essential nutrient for fertility and ovulation.
- It feeds cancer. Actually, it feeds all the cells in our bodies, but in the same insulin spiking fashion that affects our reproductive hormones, the spike of sugar also causes a response by the growth promoting hormones.
- It lowers our immune system and it feeds the yeast and bacteria in our guts. Did you know one can of pop can lower your immune system for just over 6 hours? The bad bacteria can take over easily and you fall ill to the viruses and bacteria you are exposed to.
- It causes vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Being so hard for your body to digest, sugar actually causes your body to use more of its nutrient reserve in order to process it and remove it from the body. This malnutrition results in a host of health issues!
To Be Continued…What Can You Do?
Tuesday at Naturally Knocked Up, I’ll have some advice on how to lower your refined sugar consumption and get past those sugar cravings, along with some tips and recipes on how to make desserts that will fill that sweet spot without all the white sugar:
I’m drooling! Donielle’s blog is definitely worth a visit, and be sure to visit some of the other entries in the carnival, too. My entry is the Monday Mission this week, where you’ll find my personal “no sugar” story and links to some popular alternative sweetener treats.
Next week we’re moving into the bathroom cupboards and tackling parabens in personal care products with Mindful Momma. What’s a paraben? If you don’t know, all the more reason to be sure to stick around to see. Find all the upcoming themes (and try to guess what I’ve lined up as giveaways!) here.
GIVEAWAY: Healthy Snacks to Go eBook and Some Healthy Snacks
I won a giveaway from Honeyville Grain at Simply Sugar and Gluten Free a few months back, and my kids have been having such fun with their freeze dried apples. They makes the perfect pantry staple for a no-sugar, diaper-bag friendly, I-didn’t-have-to-make-it snack to go! You can use the freeze dried fruit for baking and cooking, reconstituting it to be back like regular fruit, but we just eat it plain like finger food.
If you’ve never seen freeze dried fruit, it’s so lightweight it almost seems fake. The closest thing I can compare it to is those little Gerber “puffs” that are made for toddlers to eat. They are a seriously fun treat for this real food family, and they’re 100% fruit, no added anything.
Honeyville Grain has offered to give two winners here at KS their choice of one large can of freeze dried fruit ($16.99-24.99 value each). 
The cans are about the size of a big coffee can and hold almost 3/4 lb., which will be enough to last your family for quite a few on to go outings. The winners will also receive a copy of my Healthy Snacks to Go eBook, published next week here at Kitchen Stewardship! See my other post today for some drool-worthy photos and recipe teasers to get an idea of what’s in the eBook.
Enter to Win
THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED. THANKS FOR ENTERING!
You can enter to win both at Naturally Knocked Up and here by leaving comments, with an extra entry for linking into the carnival. Here are four opportunities to enter (Please leave a separate comment for each one):
- Comment with a piece of your personal sugar story: your addiction, rescue from sugar, something you’re trying to do to get the sugar out, etc.
- Subscribe in a reader or via email to Kitchen Stewardship (or tell me if you already do).
- Follow me on Twitter AND Tweet about the giveaway (just click the button at the top of this post).
- Check out Honeyville’s freeze dried fruit and tell me what kind you’d choose if you win. There are so many choices I’m not even sure what I’d pick!
(If you receive KS via email, you will need to click over to the site to leave a comment.) Please leave all your entries in separate comments so it’s easier for me to count.
We will use random.org’s integer generator to choose the winner. The snacks giveaway is open to U.S. residents only, but anyone may enter and hope to win the eBook! If you’re outside the U.S., please tell me in your entry, and if you win, we’ll just draw a second name for the snacks. Thanks! Entries will be accepted until 11:59 p.m. EST on Sunday, April 18th DEADLINE EXTENDED to Wednesday, April 21 at midnight EST because of technical difficulties over the weekend! Donielle and I will post the winners soon!
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Don’t miss the rest of the star-studded carnival line-up! Sign up for a free email subscription or grab my reader feed. You can also follow me on Twitter or get KS for Kindle.
If you missed the last Monday Mission, click here.
Kitchen Stewardship is dedicated to balancing God’s gifts of time, health, earth and money. If you feel called to such a mission, read more at Mission, Method, and Mary and Martha Moments.
Disclosure: Honeyville is providing free product for you, but I didn’t receive any compensation for sharing about the company in this post. See my full disclosure statement here.
Photo credits: chiara vaia and Ula
I’m entered in Works for Me Wednesday at We are THAT Family.
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PEACHES! My mouth started to water when I scrolled down the page and saw peaches. Grapes, blueberries, mango…all sound good. I think bananas would be last on my list.
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I am addicted to M&Ms and Nestle chocolate chips. I am not sure I have the desire to reduce or remove these from my day. Hmmm…reduce might be a possibility, but then I would have to own up to how much disappears in a day.
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I susbscribe via email.
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I have pretty much given us soda…now might have one a week not one a day! but still like sweet tea…darn southern habit
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I would love to try the mange, pineapple, strawberries..heck they all sound good !
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I have just started to realize that my daily “chocolate” craving is actually a “sugar” craving, since the high-quality dark chocolate squares aren’t filling the need like cheap milk chocolate did. Hmmm….
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I subscribe via Google Reader!
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I’d have trouble choosing among the berries: blueberries, blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries — they all sound good to me!
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I am a sugar-aholic. I have not yet committed to making a drastic reduction in my sugar intake. One change I did make over a year ago, though, was from artificial maple syrup (basically high fructose corn syrup with flavoring) to real maple syrup. It’s expensive so I use it sparingly (and police my husband’s use of it), but it tastes so much better!
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I subscribe via RSS.
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I follow and tweeted this giveaway post.
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I choose pears. When my Air Force dad let us eat some of his extra MREs, I always liked the freeze dried pears.
My 14-month-old has tried and loved freeze dried bananas, apples, mango, and blueberries. I had to stop giving her the blueberries, though, as they gave her diaper rash.
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I really need to work on this. My mom and brother have recently been diagnosed with diabetes. It’s on both sides of my family. It’s going to be very hard since my hubby doesn’t see any need to worry about sugar. I’ve been trying to cut back, but I really don’t know how best to start.
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I am so proud of my husband for fighting a sugar addiction. (He went 11 days without sugared pop, which was a big achievement for both of us!) Eventually, I’d love to get him off of all pop and have him choose unsweetened ice tea (or kerfir) but for now, I keep him well stocked with Diet Mountain Dew, Sugar-Free Kool Aid.
Peanuts and peanut butter seems to help with chocolate cravings, so we have LOTS of those in the house (although I fear that he is getting worn out on peanuts!)
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I’m working on cutting back on sugar…I’ve been getting healthy every other way, I guess its time.
Jana
.-= jana @ the summer house´s last blog ..Simple Baby Blankets =-.
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I subscribe via google reader. Love your blog!
Jana
.-= jana @ the summer house´s last blog ..Simple Baby Blankets =-.
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This story is really inspiring. While I don’t have PCOS, I do think (and even my mother thinks) that I have issues with sugar. To the point that it DOES affect my hormones. I have already learned ways to reduce sugar, but am excited to read on to find out applicable ways to reduce it.
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I’m debating between freeze dried apples and strawberries. YUM!!
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This could just as easily be me writing this post … except the part where I’m still not able to conceive and I’m not off sugar.
Oh, I should be. Sugar and gluten and … ugh.
Thank you for introducing us to Donielle. I’ve seen you mention Naturally Knocked Up before, but I think I’ve been unconsciously trying to pretend you hadn’t. My heart knows what I need to do, but my sugar addicted brain doesn’t want to. I needed the reminder.
.-= Em.´s last blog ..Frugal Win: Grocery Store Goodness =-.
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I follow your blog! And love it more and more
Heather
.-= Heather´s last blog ..Babies on a Budget–Diaper Edition =-.
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I’m pretty sure I’d want the blue berries…yummy! And so easy to use for snacks or baking. LOVE IT!
Heather
.-= Heather´s last blog ..Babies on a Budget–Diaper Edition =-.
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I’m ready to give it a go and cut out refined sugars. I’ve done it before, but need to start again. Cold turkey is probably best for me.
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I have a sugar problem. I’ve been realizing it over the past few months and I just can’t quite figure out where to start…use different sugars? just use less? All I’ve really done so far is ditch the high fructose stuff.
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The berries look super-yummy, but I’m imagining purple partially re-constituted fruit smeared all over my 2 year old
I think I’d go with apricots. Thanks!
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I’ve been eating too much sugar all my life and am really trying to change that – thank you for all the great information
.-= Rhonda´s last blog ..Minky Boppy =-.
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My husband doesn’t have a sweet tooth. He likes a treat now and again but rarely craves it. I could eat sweets several times a day. I’ve stopped eating sugar except on Sundays, but it’s so hard.
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All the fruits look great. I think I’d like the blueberries.
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I’m an email subscriber!
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I subscribe.
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oh, my. sugar is *reeeeally* tough for me to give up. I have refined sugar out of my diet for the most part, but do use honey and maple syrup. And here and there I do use sugar – made Cheeseslave’s pie crust and we don’t have sucanat or maple sugar or anything, so I just used white sugar, but less than the 2 t she called for. So, it’s significantly reduced in my diet but I wonder if I need to cut ALL sugars out (I mean added sugars, not like fruit, though I know some do that, too!). I want to try stevia, but have only found it w/ other things added (Truvia, e.g.) so haven’t tried it yet.
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I’m subscribed to your email newsletter – thanks
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hmmm…. which would I choose? they DO all look good and like kids would love them. I don’t see that any of the fruit is organic… am I missing that anywhere? We’re new to looking for organic, but I want to stay away from the “dirty dozen.” I think I’d go w/ grapes, but know they’re typically a high pesticide crop, so maybe bananas???
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I switched us to pure maple syrup too, and I like that we use less of it, and use it less often. I dole it out in tiny medicine cups, that hold maybe two tablespoons, and each person has one at their place, so the Liquid Gold doesn’t get dumped and spilled all over their pancakes. I tell them “If there’s any syrup on your plate after you’re done eating, you got too much.” I think husband hates me…..
I’d pick any of the berries, too, by the way.
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I would love to win the Freeze Dried Pineapple chunks from Honeyville Grains!
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I subscribe to your email newsletter!
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I have always had a HUGE sweet tooth. Like Donielle, I used to think that because sugar wasn’t causing me to gain weight, I could eat a lot of it. But I now know better and I’m trying to curb my sweet tooth and not pass the addiction on to my kids. Since I have cut out most refined sugar, I notice that sweets I used to enjoy now taste sickenly sweet to me. And I am thankful for the change in my taste buds!
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It is hard to choose which type of freeze dried fruit I would try. I’m going to say apricots or raspberries though. Freeze dried fruit makes an awesome melt-in-the-mouth toddler snack (better than O cereal!) and DS 2 loves the ones I get at trader joes. But they don’t have as many varieties as Honeyville, so I’d try one I can’t buy there.
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I, too, am working on getting sugar out of my diet. I am a huge sugar junky. I have just recently started adding coconut oil to my diet and am finding that eating more fat is helping with the desire for sugar plus I am losing weight! (I am using the book Eat Fat, Lose Fat as my guide.)
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I’m new here – subscribe via e-mail. Great info!
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Ironically, I’m making sugar cookies with my son today. Oh well – you can’t be good all the time!!
The freeze-dried fruits sound Yummmmm!!!
.-= Mindful Momma´s last blog ..Getting Kids in the Garden =-.
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I would definitely like to try the strawberries! Thanks for such an informative site.
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I would say blueberries for sure!
I saw these recently, and have been dying to try some!
.-= Jenn AKA The Leftover Queen´s last blog ..Nuts For Nuts =-.
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Freeze-dried raspberries sound fantastic!!! That’s what I would try.
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I subscribe via Google Reader. Love your blog!!!
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I’ve given up sugar a few times… usually because of the gestational diabetes I’ve had with each of my four pregnancies. But I always go back to it. It’s so hard!!! I am striving to cut way back permanently.
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I subscribe via e-mail
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I’m an email subscriber.
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