#52Health: Sugar
My second #52Habits change of 2020 is all about sugar.
While I've turned this sugar deal into a baby step habit, there is a lot of stuff going on behind it.
In autumn 2018, my wife and I sat down with each other for a weekend without the kids for a marriage retreat. We had a list of questions about our relationship, kids, health, spritual life, goals…
We decided to start keeping track of the sugar we bring into the house and the amount of sugar everyone was eating. Simple right?
Well, if you notice the date on this blog post and do some quick math, you’ll observe it’s been more than a year between deciding and doing. What happened? Well, there were some deeper things happening surrounding this that took a year of marriage counseling to get through. I’ll get to those later. But for those of you who only have a minute for the sugar change itself here it is.
One week into the new year, my wife and I decided to get rid of a ton of sugar. Should we tell the children? Will they flip out? Should we just do it in secret? We didn't know. But we decided to risk it and get the children involved.
By involving our children in the #SugarPurge, we hoped to model for them the self-discipline of getting rid of sugar.
So we all met in the kitchen. When it was time, we all ran around, hunting out the sugar from the dark corners of our home and souls. We piled up the sugary foods in the middle of the kitchen floor. It was shocking to see all of the sugary foods we had in our house. It's a Mari Kondo strategy to pile everything together. It makes you realize you have more than you need.
Then we went through a few rounds of getting rid of the sugary items. Everybody pick 10 items to get rid of. OK, now everybody pick another 5.
We didn't get rid of everything. For example, we had some sweet rolls in the freezer that my grandmother had sent down at Christmastime. No way I was going to get rid of those.
We kept a few special things and we let the kids pick out a sugary item each. Read my How the Kids Reacted article to find out about that.
To keep up with our now reduced sugar, we started using a clicker to keep track of every time that Katie or I brought sugar into our house or fed sugar to ourselves or our children.
So why did it take so long to actually do this? To hear more about that, check out my next post.