Chai's Blog

Today I swiped The No Sweets Diet habit in the Lift app for 15th time in a row. This is some sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ment for me, who loves eat­ing. In anoth­er 13 days I would have con­tributed my bit to the “world’s largest crowd-sourced ran­dom­ized diet tri­al ” a.k.a. The Quan­ti­fied Diet Project.

Why do you have to diet?

Just like that. Just for fun. There is no com­pelling rea­son for my par­tic­i­pa­tion in this diet. I nev­er diet­ed in my life ear­li­er so I just want to test myself if I can be on diet for a stip­u­lat­ed time. So I picked what I believed is the sim­plest diet to stick to. And then, this con­tri­bu­tion to the big­ger goal thing.

How difficult is this diet?

I found this diet to be very easy to fol­low. In fact, I expect­ed this diet to be the sim­plest and eas­i­est to fol­low of all the 10 avail­able options. After 15 days, it proved to be so. Because I just don’t have to eat sug­ary stuff. I can still eat nuts, savories, chips, meat etc. And trust me, zero sug­ar cof­fee is not real­ly bad.

Though it was a bit dif­fi­cult ( or even rude) to say no to all those choco­late cakes, cook­ies, treats and post-biryani cokes, I think it is not impos­si­ble. It is also very well worth it because at the end of every day I had that much less unnec­es­sary sug­ar in my body.

I feel slight­ly bad about not yet being able to put my tongue on some of my faves like Giapo, Whit­tak­er’s and Hide n Seek Fab in the new year. Nev­er­the­less, if Whit­tak­er’s are sell­ing since 1896, I don’t see any rea­son why they can’t con­tin­ue to sell for anoth­er 13 days and beyond. I am sure, so will be the case with oth­er stuff that I am miss­ing tem­porar­i­ly.

What are the advantages of this diet?

Besides much tout­ed advan­tages of eat­ing sug­ar free, most impor­tant­ly, I became more mind­ful about what I put in my body. Every time I eat some­thing (sug­ary or sug­ar-free) , I pause and think a bit rather than mind­less­ly stuff­ing the food. This is an impor­tant pos­i­tive change for me.

What next?

I am going to con­tin­ue the streak for the next 13 days which will give me the sat­is­fac­tion of fin­ish­ing some­thing that I start­ed and con­tribut­ing to the project that mat­ters.

The idea of this whole exer­cise is not to eat sug­ar-free for the rest of my life. That is not prac­ti­cal and unsus­tain­able for some­one like me who has year’s worth of bad momen­tum.

It only means now I became more mind­ful about sug­ar and junk. There­fore I am less like­ly to eat them every time. Per­haps I will eat sug­ar selec­tive­ly rather than hog any can­dy, cook­ie or cake that comes my way.