I just mean a good drink to help go low(er) sugar?
kombucha (low sugar)
coconut milk (no added sugar/low sugar)
Honestly, the best way to lower your intake of sugar isn’t to replace it with a different sweetener. In most cases, you’ll find its not an adequate ‘replacement’ because psychologically, looking for a direct analog (or super close in taste at the minimum).
It’s the habit that needs to change, not the way you scratch the itch. I’m not a fan of absolutes, so I don’t think an intention of “no more refined sugar. Period.” is practical or reasonable. But cutting down how much you intake by reducing the frequency, that’ll do wonders for you.
This method is what kick started my journey down this same path. You can still have sugar (yay!), but you most likely won’t want to very often after not too long (wtf?).
It is so mind bottlingly crazy how much sugar is in literally everything from breads to sauces. Once I cut down how much sugar I was taking in (by cutting down how often I had a sweet drink of any kind, one drink at a time), I could taste the sweetness in food at restaurants, savory stuff from the bakery…I couldn’t escape it.
Now, I’ll have a couple of sweet drinks in a day. I control how much sugar I put in by not buying sweet drinks and instead making stuff at home. Coffee, flavored water, etc.
Long story short…
There is NO great methadone for refined sugar. If you want to reduce how much you’re ingesting, reduce the frequency. Be kind to yourself by setting reasonable, bite-sized goals so that the achievement encourages you to continue on and make more progress.
Anything in moderation; nothing in excess
I can definitely resonate with this.
I’m ‘old school British’ with my drinks, in the sense that I have far too much tea in a day. I’ve gradually reduced the amount of sugar, and now I’m down to one sometimes less than one teaspoon per mug (larger than a traditional cup though more common I suppose). I have most certainly noticed the same effect, as it has reduced my sugar dependency overall; I can taste sweetness in things much better now, and this only took a little while. Barely noticeable of an effort.
A few drops of Lemon or lime juice in Carbonated water.
That’s the good shit. Not just a few drops, get the whole lemon in there.
If you want something to replace soda and don’t want artificial sweeteners, flavored carbonated water can scratch that itch. There’s some that are low sugar and some that are no sugar. They have some really interesting flavors, too. La Croix is not a great brand, in my opinion.
All sparkling water costs significantly more than it used to before ~10 years ago. Safeway brand is my go to, but I miss those being like 3 bucks for a 12 pack.
Haha! This whole post was a ploy to get you to try those brands and it totally worked! We got 'em boys!
It’s a bit of pop science to say that nutrisweet and other artificial sweeteners produce the same insulin response as sugar, but that’s not what the data indicates.
The response is consistently lower.
So my recommendation is to switch to diet soda, assuming the sugary drinks you’re drinking are sodas.
If they’re fruit juices, I would recommend relaxing them with smoothies. The fiber in a smoothie slows the absorption of the sugar, resulting in less of a blood glucose spike.
I’m a big fan of unsweetened soda water. Ila Croix, klarbrunn, bubly.
I make my own though with a soda stream. I have a shit ton of hops as a home brewer so I make flavoring that’s steeped hops (filtered out after steeping), combined 50/50 with juice blend I make 50/50 from lemon and lime. Not the fake from concentrate shit, but I don’t fresh squeeze it either. You can get the real stuff in most grocery stores these days.
So 1/2 hops tea, 1/4 unsweetened lemon juice and 1/4 unsweetened lime juice.
Then I put about an inch of that in a pint glass and fill it the rest of the way with soda water.
Very low calorie and hits the spot. It has helped me entirely stop drinking beer at home.
