Morning sweetie!

Sunday 26th July 2015

You are awesome & BeYOUtiful, end of discussion!

How was your Saturday?  Great I hope, did you take part in #ShareIt, I saw some delicious meals on Facebook, I'm hoping you all continue to share your meal photos via social media today again.  If you didn't have a good food day yesterday, ok so you had a bad day!  Don't beat yourself up over it, don't let one bad decision send you spiralling out of control, grab that tracker and back on it.  Get back to making decisions that improve your health and your happiness.  Remember you are who you choose to be.

I had a very chilled afternoon yesterday, a fab morning meeting and a coffee with some lovely ladies after was enough excitement for me for one day, so I went and pottered in my garden for a bit then realised I didn't actually want to do anything so I had me a glass or two of prosecco, one mixed with Vimto zero and the other with sugar free cherryade and I can tell you they are both a nice combination and a great way to get your alcohol to last longer.   Why prosecco, well on Thursday a link about how much sugar was in alcohol was shared with me and the lowest was prosecco, with a quarter of a teaspoon of sugar per glass.  I'm assuming that's a 125ml glass, whereas in 50ml of Bailey's there's 2.5 teaspoon - ouch! 

Here’s a league table of sugar content (figure shown is the number of teaspoons):
Pint of Guinness or stout - 5
Pint of premium lager - 3.5
568ml bottle of Magners pear cider - 8.5
Pint of Strongbow dry cider - 3.5
175ml glass of mulled wine - 11
175ml glass of medium sweet wine - 2.5
Vodka and Red Bull - 7
Gin and tonic - 5.5
Vodka and Coca Cola - 6.5
Sambuca shot - 4
Amaretto shot - 4
50ml glass of Baileys - 2.5
50ml glass of Port - 3
50ml glass of sweet sherry - 2
Smirnoff Ice - 7.5
Barcardi Breezer - 5.25

That makes interesting reading, sugar is the devil of the moment in the nutritional world, you may have noticed, oh yes for decades we’ve been led to believe that fat is the ultimate food enemy, not any more, these days the real danger is sweet, addictive, potentially harmful and of course can be found in almost everything we eat!

Yeah sugar is found in so many foods, even baked beans contain two and a half teaspoons of sugar in just half a tin, if you want to be more aware of how much sugar is in your diet, you have to learn to identify it first because they don't just write 'sugar' in the ingredients list.

There are many different names for sugar. Two really good ways to disguise sugar on food labels is to use a long, scientific sounding word or to rename the sugar altogether.

One of the easiest ways to recognize sugar on a food label is by recognizing the -ose suffix. When you find words that end in -ose, there's a good chance it is sugar. 

Sugars ending in -ose include: Sucrose, Maltose, Dextrose, Fructose, Glucose, Galactose, Lactose, High fructose corn syrup, Glucose solids
            Just because it doesn't end in -ose, however, doesn't mean it isn't sugar. There are plenty of other names as well that may or may not sound like sugar. 

Regardless of how they sound, the following are all sugar:

Cane juice, Dehydrated cane juice, Cane juice solids, Cane juice crystals, Dextrin, Maltodextrin, Dextran, Barley malt, Beet sugar, Corn syrup, Corn syrup solids, Caramel, Buttered syrup, Carob syrup, Brown sugar, Date sugar, Malt syrup, Diatase, Diatastic malt, Fruit juice, Fruit juice concentrate, Dehydrated fruit juice, Fruit juice crystals, Golden syrup, Turbinado,  Sorghum syrup, Refiner's syrup, Ethyl maltol, Maple syrup, Yellow sugar.

Everything in moderation, it's all about balance!  On that note, happy Sunday, enjoy your day, I hear rains on the way!