Update on our plan, and foods discovered:
The day was successful. It is quite eye-opening to discover just how much sugar is in our usual healthy foods. For example, for 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, we had to count 2 Sugars. Rice wine vinegar would have cost none, but I didn't have any on hand for the dressing I was making with the olive oil and garlic. 1/4 cup of brown rice has 38 grams of carbs, which count for 2 of the 6 Carb servings we are allowed each day. It's only a 1/4 of a cup, which is not much, but good to remember when it comes to portions eating out.
I tried the green tea frappuccino recipe in Jorge Cruise's Belly Fat Cure book, he calls it the "Energize Me Green Tea" with only 1 Sugar count and one Carb serving count, and I'm not sure where he's coming up with either. It's meant to be a replacement for Starbucks "Belly Bad" Tazo Green Tea Frappuccino Blended Creme beverage (at 69 whopping grams of sugar for their "lightly sweetened" version.) Yikes! This healthier recipe contains a total of 1/2 cup of heavy cream per serving, which is a LOT more saturated fat than we are accustomed to. It definitely creamed up the drink, and the product was mighty tasty, but Richard and I agree that it was a bit too heavy, and it would probably be just as good with the unsweetened Almond Breeze instead. The recipe calls for Jay Robb Vanilla Whey Protein Powder which would help thicken it up a bit even without the heavy cream. It was a good experiment though. I will definitely feel better about it without the thick cream. Regardless, even with that thick rich drink we managed to stay within our 15 grams of Sugar and 6 Carb servings.
We found a little challenge with getting Sugar counts without Carb serving counts, because everything we'd had in the day until that point had both. We solved that by having berries (strawberries, blueberries and blackberries) with enough goat yogurt to count for Sugar but not Carb servings.
On that note, we were a little dismayed to find out that our stevia-sweetened drinks (like Zero Vitamin Water and Sobe-life water) also contain maltilol, a sugar alcohol, so they each contain 1 Carb serving, even if they don't count in the sugar counts. so, those will have to be incorporated carefully. We were, however, delighted to discover that the Virgil's Diet Root Beer and Diet Cola are sweetened only with stevia, so count for no sugar grams and NO carb servings. Hooray!
Even our psyllium husks count for a Carb serving, if we take the full 2 1/2 tablespoons. So, since I was out of Carb servings, I took only 1 Tablespoon, which kept the total grams of carbs at 4 grams, so zero servings, and I still got some beneficial additional fiber.
We walked our delightful route into and through town and around our local lake. It was a gorgeous day, and I feel very good about our first day of the challenge.
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