The QueenEating sugar free is not as hard as you might think. Come with me as I outline a full day of eating sugar free to control my blood pressure.
Sugar Free Coffee Routine
I received a question on my Instagram account this week, about how I sweeten my coffee without sugar.
This is a question near and dear to my heart because I struggled with this for years as well. Even before I knew I had a blood pressure problem, I knew I had problems with sugar. I went through a phase in college where I was randomly passing out. A doctor diagnosed me with hypoglycemia. This meant my blood sugar levels spiked severely after I ate sugar, then dropped significantly. This is what was causing me to pass out.
My doctor recommended I carry around butterscotch candy with me to suck on when I felt like I was going to pass out. That did work for a while. But I always thought that was a bit strange, curing an illness with sugar that was caused in the first place by sugar. But I was in college, and it was the late 90’s, so my dietary habits at that time were not logical or beneficial.
after college when I started my corporate job, I noticed a certain point in the morning I was unable to focus and I started wondering if the sugar in my morning coffee was doing that to me. So I started to experiment with sugar alternatives. For years I used Splenda, which flavor wise was okay, and it successfully kept my focus at a regulated level. But I soon started to worry about the possibility that this new man-made substance was actually not good for me.
But I also really loved my morning coffee and I loved the sweetness in my morning coffee, so I thought going sugar free would be impossible. Then I discovered maple syrup. Which sounds strange, I know. But hear me out. This is not the pancake syrup we all used in the 90s. This is real maple syrup tapped from a tree, fought over by the Canadian mafia.
I made up that last part. But this is good stuff. It’s more expensive than white refined sugar, but I only use a teaspoon per cup because it sweetens very well. And also, I look at it as an investment in my health.
In addition to keeping my blood sugar levels from fluctuating, maple syrup has other health benefits including Calcium, Potassium, Iron, Zinc, Manganese.
I also like to up the volume of nutrition in my morning coffee by using almond milk and coconut milk and sometimes oat milk. You can read more about the health benefits of those here.
And I use collagen as well, to help keep my joints pliable because I have osteoarthritis as well as high blood pressure.
Breakfast
For my sugar free breakfast today I’m having some avocado toast with hard boiled eggs. I use a sourdough bread which is sugar free. But more than that, the bacteria that helps form sourdough modifies the structure of the bread molecules, helping your body absorb them slower. This lowers the bread’s glycemic index and keeps your insulin levels from spiking like a regular slice of bread would.
Eggs, which have many heart healthy benefits, avocado of course, and today I’m feeling like having some lemon on top of my avocado. I don’t normally do this but I was craving this morning. And I like to respond to my cravings by giving them what they want. And of course I’m having some Everything but the Bagel seasoning from Trader Joe’s. This has salt in it, so I’m not going to add any additional salt to my eggs.
Avocado has Vitamin K, Folate, Vitamins C and potassium, which – if you watched my videos about my 12 health habits, I explain how patossassium has an inverse relationship with sodium in your body so it’s very good for you if you have high blood pressure. It also is full of healthy fats, which keeps you feeling full for longer periods of time.
Lemons are a great source of Vitamin C and can help your body absorb iron from your diet, so they are great for anemia. They also provide you with Potassium and B6. Because I was craving lemon this morning, it’s possible my body was feeling deficient in one of these. Which is why I usually like to give it what it wants.
Eggs are full of heart healthy benefits. Protein, Vitamin A, Folate, Vitamins B2, B12 and B5, Selenium, which acts as an antioxidant. Normally I like a fried egg on top of my avocado toast. But today I was feeling like having something a little different.
And I’m having a banana with my breakfast as well, to up the nutritional volume and add a little something sweet.
Lunch
For lunch today I’m making homemade hummus. I don’t have my own recipe for this because I found the best one possible and I haven’t strayed from it. I’ll link the recipe in the description box below.
You know how sometimes you find a recipe and it’s so good that you can’t bring yourself to eat the store bought version anymore because you know if you make it yourself it’s so much better? That is how I feel about this hummus. There’s a few Mediterranean restaurants close to us that also make great hummus and I eat that. But I no longer eat the already made cups of hummus from the grocery store because let me tell you those just don’t compare.
One of the keys to this recipe, I think, is boiling the garbanzo beans because you don’t have to peel the casings off the beans that way. And trust me when I say I would not be making homemade hummus if I had to shell each individual garbanzo bean. I do have my limits.
You add baking soda to the beans and then you top them with water and then boil them and it’s perfect every time.
I’m going to cut up some cucumber to dip while I’m waiting on that to boil.
And also, while you’re waiting on the beans to boil, you put the garlic in the lemon juice into a food processor and give it a mix and then and let it sit for a while, so the lemon juice can infuse with the garlic. One of the great things about this recipe is that it provides a burst of raw garlic to your diet, which has so many heart health benefits.
Some people in the natural health world swallow garlic cloves WHOLE when they start feeling sick, to fight the infection. Some people take garlic pills. If you don’t want to do any of that, which I totally get, hummus is a great way to consume raw garlic.
For dippers we used celery, carrots, cucumbers, and some pita bread. This lunch is not completely sugar free because the pita bread does have small doses of sugar and preservatives in it, but it was a negligible amount and totally worth it. I toast the pita bread in the oven while I’m making the hummus and it is so yummy to dip a warm slice of pita bread into a cool bowl of hummus.
Tahini is a great source of phosphorus and manganese, both of which play vital roles in bone health. It’s also high in thiamine and B6, which are important for energy production. Tahini is a paste made from toasted, ground sesame seeds. Some people use it as a peanut butter replacement. I’ve never found the two to be very similar, but I do love them both.
I make two different bowls of this because my husband does not like quite as much paprika as I do. I also like to add a little extra shot of lemon to mine at the end as well. The kids usually eat from mine too, though this time, my oldest son suggested it might have been a little too lemony. I should point out that my son actually prefers the store bought containers of hummus that I don’t enjoy anymore. So we do still buy it. To each their own, right?
After lunch I did a long yoga video in my office. I actually had the heater going because I was chilly. So I did a little homemade hot yoga.
Sugar-Free Dinner
At dinner, I realized I’d had a bit of a lemon theme going for the day. Which is okay. Like I said, my body clearly needed it. I honestly just didn’t plan to have so many lemons for the day. But that’s how it went anyway.
For dinner, I’m making another sugar-free staple recipe that is not my own. I’m making Ina Garten’s lemon chicken with bow tie pasta. My kids love this dish. And honestly it’s so easy to make. The key is to marinate the chicken, and I’m making that marinade now.
A few weeks ago I showed you that I add my used lemon rinds to a mason jar filled with vinegar and after it soaks for a while, and the vinegar infuses with the lemon, I use that as my cleaning solution, my everyday spray in the kitchen.
But my husband saw a TikTok recently where lemon rinds were used to infuse vodka and make a lovely lemon and mint julep cocktail, so that is what I’m doing here, adding these used lemon rinds to the vodka, so when the weather warms up we can make a lovely cocktail and sip it on the back porch.
I’m also putting the leftover thyme into a small jar with water, like you would with flowers. I love having herbs like this on my windowsill. Just makes everything smell and good and feel good and little things like that are important to produce dopamine on a daily basis.
Rao’s pasta is some of my very favorite. They also make a really good pasta sauce with no sugar, which is awesome. The broccoli here could have been more substantial. I think next time I’ll buy two of these bags. I like to have a good ratio between the pasta and the broccoli. And yes, I’m using that entire bag of pine nuts.
To dress the pasta we’re using some butter and oil and garlic and parmesan cheese. And of course, some lemon.
Normally I’d grill the chicken, but our propane tank was out, so I pan fried the chicken on the stove instead. It made for more work than usual for this dish. So I highly recommend grilling the chicken if you can.
One of the things I like about this recipe is you make the broccoli in the boiling water, and then you make the pasta in the same water. It’s very efficient. Makes for less cleanup. And I love this method.
The finished product is so good. I love that my whole family loves it and we can all sit down and enjoy it together with no fuss.
If you’d like to see more What I Eat in a Day content. I release a video every Sunday on my YouTube channel.