So the first week is over and everyone is looking good so far. A few minor lapses, but realistically, everyone is doing awesome. Such a dramatic change for some people and you should all be so proud of yourselves!!!

A lot of you are asking questions about various sweet options and how you can get around not having these sweet things. Others are complaining that the options they have are not sweet enough. One of the main points to this month is to try to re-train your tastebuds not to crave sweet all the time. That won’t happen when you find loopholes or use artificial sweetener. The aim to to go suagr free. Sugar makes things sweet. If you keep having sweet things, you will go straight back to sugar on the 1st December. Please try to change your eating habits and see what happens.

One thing not be worried about is the fruit. If you are trying to lose weight with this challenge then I say to keep to the 2 pieces of fruit per day. If weight loss is not your goal and just like me, you are merely trying to create the healthiest body possible by eliminating all the refined sugar, then go ahead and eat more than 2 pieces per day. It is the least thing to worry about on the challenge.

I faced my first challenge on Thursday night. Unlike a lot of you, I am not challenged by the thought of no alcohol or no sugar in my caffeine as I don’t drink either. My challenge is sweets. Lately I have been going late night shopping with my wife and daughter. This is a treat for us because I work every other week night and it is only in the last 2 months that I have taken Thursday nights of, so we usually go and cruise around the shops as we have never been late night shopping in the 6 years we have been together.

So, whenever we go late night shopping, we get a treat. It might be sweet popcorn, it might be cookie man or something along those lines. I am happy ot say that I was not even tempted on Thursday night. I am still 100% sweet free and now that I am through that first week, there are no cravings. When you don’t have it, you don’t crave it.

But, I have not been perfect. Yesterday, I have a handful of hot chips and I have stated that white potato is not allowed in NOSUGARVEMBER due to it’s position on the glycemic index. It is a very common food to be eaten and it is around 80 on the glycemic index, right next to white rice for all you sushi lovers, so it is a good habit to get out of eating it regularly.

So, as penance for my handful of hot chips, here are my 5 burpees…

Good luck for week 2 guys and girls:)

This morning we had a running only challenge. The first time I have given you guys running only, give me your feedback in the comments.

It seems that a few of you have strayed from the challenge already and some of you forsee that you may stray in the near future.
Well, you all put your name down to give up sugar for the month, not just when it suits you, so there must be a punishment for every deviation from the plan.
I am not going to enforce this on you, I will just hope that I can guilt you into enforcing on yourself. Being accountable to others is an awesome way to stay focussed, but a self inflicted puishment is another great way to back yourself up.
Every time you eat or drink something that is not allowed, I want you to do burpees.
Starting from today, your first indescretion shall recieve 5 burpees. Every subsequent deviation from the challenge you should double your amount of burpees.
So, your second indescretion shall recieve 10 burpees. Your third is 20 burpees and so on. If you manage to stray 5 times, you will be doing 80 burpees.
Now I know that you have to be disciplined enough to inflict these burpees on yourselves, but here is the main rule.
Each item you eat or drink something wrong is 1 indescretion. So don’t think oh well, I have to do burpees for this, I may as well drink 5 beers and make the most of it. NO, that would be 5 mistakes right there and that would be 5 + 10 + 20 + 40 + 80 burpees. Get it!
I am doing this for your own good.
To be honest with you, I am so proud of how well you have done so far, but it is only the first week and I want you to succeed for the entire month.
By the end of this month, hopefully your tastebuds will have changed and you will no longer want sugar in your caffeine, you will be out of the habit of a sweet after dinner and you will have an understanding of what a healthy balanced meal consists of and tatses like.
Please feel free to send me any photos of your burpees if they have to take place or even post them on the facebook page. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=285890880354

MOST IMPORTANTLY, don’t let this discourage you from documenting your mistakes for others to see. I want you all to be honest with yourself and others. Your honesty and diligence is more important than the burpees, but hey.. you will burn off some of the sugar during the burpees!!!

Good luck:)

Ok, so it has been a shaky start to the month for a few of you, but all in all, you are doing great!

Tough call to start 2 days before Melbourne cup, but I am absolutely positive that those of you who did drink and eat junk, certainly ate and drank much less than you would have otherwise. So that, to me is a success.

I am also very happy to say that 2 people who are not even on the challenge have said to me that they now realise how much sugar they are consuming and are actively cutting down. Again, that is a success story to me.

Good luck with the rest of the week and the weekend:)

Yesterday whilst litening to the radio in the car, a woman rang in to make a complaint about KFC. Now she opened by stating that she is 8 1/2 months pregnant, so she is eating whatever she wants.

Now this says to me she is fully aware of how bad KFC is for you and the social stigma associated with eating such crap, so she justified herself by stating that she is growing a foetus inside of her and that she has the right to feed that foetus whatever garbage she decides, simply because she is fat anyway.

Now this is not uncommon. I remember when my wife was pregnant and because she continued to eat healthily as she always did, the women in the office would gather around her and say – “You know you can eat whatever you want now, you’re going to get fat anyway”.

These are the same women who will complain about their weight day in and day out, will go on and off diets for the rest of their lives and will bitch about someone who has a better body than them to make themselves feel better.

One of the girls in my wife’s mothers group has an overweight friend who said – ” I can’t wait to get pregnant again so I can justify being fat”. No joke, she actually said that. Her friend thought as she was hearing it – “Why don’t you just lose weight”. But, she couldn’t say that, she could only think it, because you’re not allowed to tell people they are fat, you can only tell people they are too skinny or they should eat more junk food.

Just the same as you can’t make someone feel bad for stuffing a large piece of chocolate cake in their mouth, but you can make them feel bad for not stuffing that same piece of chocolate cake in their mouth and choosing an apple instead.

What you will find is that people will be constantly encouraging you to eat crap, so that they can feel beter about eating it themselves.

Be strong willed, don’t let them get to you, be healthy and if you are pregnant or trying to get pregnant, please feed your foetus healthy nutritious food!

As a little related side note, last night I was watching “The Office”. One of the averweight guys has a heart attack as a result of one of his fellow employees playing a practical joke. The boss says – “You gave Stanley a heart attack”. His response was – “Yes, I shoved butter and sugar in his mouth and forced him not to exercise for the last 50 years”.

Only in a TV show could we get away with that honesty.

Here’s a few things that work for me on the go or at work. The main thing is to be prepared. Don’t rely on takeaway. Not only is it expensive, it is low in nutritional value and sometimes when you get to a food court, the big mac can smell better than the chicken salad sandwich, which means if you are not disciplined, you could be tucking into a big mac more often than not.

Poached eggs at work – I put boiling water into a cereal bowl, crack in 2 eggs and put in the microwave for 1min 15 seconds. Drain off the water and eat.

Protein shake bircher muesli – I mix up a berry protein shake and add my serving of rolled oats. Leave over night and drink it down on the way to work.

Sandwiches for lunch – I always keep cheese in the fridge at work. I bring a whole tomato and cucumber from home. I poach a whole chicken and pull of the meat and use for sandwiches. You could make this at home and bring it in, but I make it on the spot to keep it fresh.

poached chicken salad sandwich

Have you got any tips you’d like to share?

I grew up in a household that always ate healthy food. I was always encouraged to eat lots of fruit during the day, dinner would always be salad or vegetables sometimes with meat, sometimes without. We always drank filtered water. Cereals like cocopops would be on birthdays or Christmas. I would have weetbix or cornflakes. Bread was always wholemeal. Mc Donalds was once every couple of months at best. KFC was once a year at best.

But, every night after dinner we would tuck into a dessert of some kind. I would eat ice lollies and ice creams during the day. Mum would always bring home a cake of some sort when she went shopping. There was always some sort of biscuits in the cupboard and remember those weetbix and cornflakes I ate every morning, they were dredged in sugar to give them flavour.

So you can see there is this idea that is common in many families that sugar can form part of a healthy diet and it’s not bad for you. So long as you eat your veggies, you can eat your chocolate cake.

I don’t regret for one minute being brought up to eat healthy food, but I had developed these habits around sugar hits and those sort of habits are hard to break.

Up until 3 years ago, I still ate sweets during the day and night. A nice healthy tuna and salad sandwich finished off with a cupcake. I felt I had deserved it for having such a healthy lunch. I would be preparing stir fried chicken and veg for dinner whilst Hannah was baking the cookies for after.

About 4 years ago, I decided that based on advice from nutritionist friends, I would limit my sweets to after dinner at night. This was a massive shift and also very beneficial. It’s like a smoker going from a pack a day to 5 smokes a day.

About 3 years ago, I decided to only eat sweets on weekends. Again a massive improvement. I was listening to a guy named Paul Chek who at the time was taking the fitness industry by storm. He said sugar is poison in the body and whilst I agreed to some degree, I didn’t bother to do my own research, I just decided to cut back a bit.

Over the years, I have heard enough to make me want to stop eating sugar all together. I have done my research and I know sugar is very bad for you and it makes you fat, but in all honesty I made the decision to eliminate as much sugar from my diet as possible when I completed my CrossFit cert in May 2009. I was in a room with guys and girls who made it a priority to not eat sugar and they spoke a lot about the ill effects sugar has on the body. They were fit, healthy and ripped. I wasn’t fat by any means, but I knew I could rip up a bit and improve my health, so I made a vow not to eat sugar for as long as I could. This was a big call for me. People would ask me if I was never going to eat sugar again. I told them I would love to say yes, but realistically that is not true. I am going to not eat sugar for as long as possible. then I will eat it as little as possible.

I went for 2 months with no sugar. Everytime I wanted some sugar I thought of those guys and what they spoke about and I thought about their eating habits. It actually wasn’t hard. The problem is that when you eat sugar you want more, so if you can get through the first week, you should be fine. I don’t kid myself with Christmas around the corner, Hannah and I have a tradition of making rocky road for our friends and family and a ginger bread house for Christmas day, but I can tell you I am going no sugar until nearly Christmas time and then back on the wagon straight after New year and whilst that is not perfect 365 days a year, it is realistic and a huge improvement.

I don’t have a problem with lashing out on special occasions, the main thing is to determine what is a real special occasion – your birthday or anniversary or a holiday you have been planning for months OR is it just Friday night out with friends or a hard day at work or Sunday friends come over. I could probably create a so called “special occasion” weekly if I had to in order to justify my weakness. But I would rather be fit and healthy.

My reasons for not eating sugar are not weight related at all, they are health related. So if I can do it and I don’t need to lose fat, it is even more important for you if you need to lose bodyfat.

If you’ve got anything you’d like to share, please feel free to write it in the comments.

I am just going to tell you guys what I take and why I take it.

I feel great all the time and I rarely get sick. I am a normal weight and I don’t do anything extreme. I exercise most days at a high intensity. I eat healthy and try to minimise sugar and I take these 4 supplements regularly.

1) Juice Plus: Fruit and vegetable capsules. I don’t care how much fruit and veg you or I eat, you need more. We get all of our vitamins and minerals from fruit and veg and this is how we build strong immune systems to fight against disease and illness.

Multivitamins are a waste of money, they are manufactued in a factory and you pee them out. You shouldn’t be trying to isolate any particular vitamins and feed them to your body. Juice plus is a whole food supplement, meaning it is 16 fruits and vegetables dehydrated and stuck into a gelatine capsule without the sugar.

Where to get it – Contact me and I will get it from my nutritionist for you. It’s not cheap, but it’s cheaper than a coffee a day and so worth every cent.

When to take it – Daily

2) Protein powder: Optimum nutrition – Natural 100% whey protein, strawberry or vanilla flavour. The chocolate is gross.

Many of us don’t get enough protein in our diets, so a protein power can be a great option. It also makes for a low calorie, low carbohydrate snack. It is quick and easy to prepare if you don;t have time to prepare a snack at work.

Most protein powders are full of so many chemicals and weird ingredients, this is the most natural one I have found on the market. In fact it’s all natural.

Where to get it – I buy it from a website called vitaminking.com. It is a lot cheaper than the shops and they send it to your door for $5 http://www.vitaminking.com.au/100-natural-whey-protein-by-optimum.html

When to take it – Up to your indiviual needs.

3) Fish oil capsules: Any reputable brand should be ok. Fish oil is great for brain function, joint function and maintaining healthy cholesterol levels and fighting against coronary heart disease.

Where to get it – Your local supermarket or health food store. You can get bulk containers which makes it fairly cheap.

When to take it - Daily

4) Psylium husk: This is just fibre. Your body won’t digest it, it will absorb water and pass through your colon and pick up lots of crap on it’s way out the other end. Great for cleaning out your colon and fighting against bowel cancer. 

Where to get it – Your local supermarket or health food store. Buy a large bag for about $6 which will last for ages.

When to take it – 1 teaspoon mixed in a glass of water daily for the first couple of weeks. By then you should be somewhat cleaned out, so 2 – 3 times a week should be fine from then on. If you aren’t noticing much difference when you go to the toilet, try a tablespoon instead.

There you have it, other than that, eat plenty of veggies and salad and lean protein, some fruit, nuts and grains. Drink plenty of filtered water, move daily and sleep well.