No Sweets November

It's been a while since I've updated, I hope you can forgive me. In case your forgiveness requires justification, well, I was focusing on other projects like painting and repainting the living room, putting out fun fall decorations, hanging out with my family at the pumpkin patch, attending our first wedding shower, working on marriage mentoring homework, designing wedding invitations, collecting addresses, and mailing out our wedding invites. And then there was a beastly week-long sinus infection that's still working its way out. It's been busy!

While I do promise to write update about our painting projects, wedding showers, and fall/Thanksgiving decorations, I am actually writing today to introduce my newest project:

Yes, I'm really cutting out sweets for the entire month of November! Now that's not to say that I'll be cutting out all sugar. I'll still be eating fruit, honey, and a small amount of sugar substitute. But I am saying buh-bye to full sugar cakes, cookies, and candy. To clarify, here are my rules:

1. Fill up on fruit.
2. Dark chocolate, honey, pure maple syrup, or sugar substitute as little as possible.
3. No processed foods that list an added sugar in the ingredients (sugar, juice concentrate, corn syrup, rice syrup, cane juice, etc.)

So I'm not depriving myself completely. I don't think I can not have chocolate at all. But instead of eating half a bag of chocolate chips for dessert, I may melt them and drizzle them on strawberries. Instead of making chocolate chip cookies using the traditional recipe, I'll use unsweetened applesauce and sugar substitute in place of the normal almost 2 cups of white and brown sugars. I want to be aware of how much sugar I'm eating and avoid eating it just 'cuz.

In addition to my not depriving myself - yes, I realize Thanksgiving is in November. Also in November, is one of my wedding showers. I'm not going to go crazy (I hope not at least), but I am going to allow myself some sweets. For my shower, I'll have a small bit of dessert but only if I'm hungry. Since I host Thanksgiving, I'm going to try to tweak the family favorites with as little sugar as possible (I'll try to post recipes!) and I will be having dessert. And I'll be having leftovers the rest of the weekend. I know, I'm terrible. But it's Thanksgiving!

So as I sit here on Halloween night, eating all of the leftover candy and sweets I have in the house, I encourage you to stick around. I mean you do want to be around when I have a chocolate withdrawal meltdown, right??