This isn’t the most beemindery thing but we’re starting a no-sugar month at the Beesnest (i.e., our house) tomorrow. I’m interested to see what effect that has on my fasting blood glucose, while I have this CGM. Today we’re making a cake and cookies.
These sugar free gummy bears should make a fine addition to your experiment if their reviews are any indication 
Very interested to see the effects on glucose!
We just made 3 berry cobblers last night (blackberry, raspberry, and blueberry) so we’ll be eating extra sugar to make up for you guys!
Is honey allowed at the Beesnest? And why isn’t it the Beehive?
Why are you making a cake and cookies if you won’t be able to eat them tomorrow? Are you gonna finish them all today?
Pretty sure that’s the name for Beeminder HQ? I’m guessing Danny and Bethany already have enough trouble with work/home boundaries without calling them the same thing. 
Ha, yes, exactly. The Beehive is the office and the Beesnest is our house. 
(Although we lost the office to the pandemic so the Beehive is more a state of mind for now, I guess?)
PS to @zedmango: yes, we’re eating it all today! Cake down, cookies to go…
Here’s what we’re coming up with for our no-sugar month rules:
Official rules, starting 2020 Jun 21:
Nothing with any sweetener (including artificial sweeteners) as an ingredient.
Nothing processed, defined as anything containing an ingredient Cantor can’t pronounce.
No packaged snacks.
No processed fruit. Dried or smushed fruit is ok, but nothing can be added or removed. So no “100% fruit” jelly since they add things like fruit pectin, and no fruit juice since that has the fiber removed. So if you make a smoothie you can core the apples but not peel them. You have to consume exactly what you’d consume when eating the raw fruit.
Exceptions, which we can add to if we all agree: RX bars, chewable vitamins, milk including oat milk.
Danny will be eschewing anything starchy (potatoes, rice, pasta, bread) but this is not a strict rule.
Penalty for violations: $10 per 150cal, prorating allowed.
All right! Feast day!! Very exciting!
So this definition shrinks as Cantor gets better at pronouncing things! Good incentive for him to practice pronunciation.
Could you boil some fruit and make jelly if you don’t add anything?
Now I’m really curious if you give your kids credit so they can rack up a big sugar bill if they choose. They will probably grow up with unusually healthy attitudes towards money, considering their parents don’t have any issues paying each other to do chores! (I still don’t see why people react so weirdly to that.)
@dreev I admire your will power. I would not last a day I am the type of person to add multiple table spoons of sugar to almost anything, corn, chili, tea, beans, cornbread, spaghetti and etc. I honestly probably should lower my sugar intake.
People CAN change. I’ve gone from 2+ decades of 1-2 spoons of sugar in my coffee to 0. It was a gradual process of course, but I’m now at the point of simply adding milk to coffee is enough to have the feeling of having a “sweetened coffee” (I alternate between black coffee and cappucino). Added benefit is the ability to consume smaller portions of sweet stuff because you don’t need the same sugar dosage to get the same satisfaction of sweetness.
How’s it been going? Ready to attack someone with a spoon for some ice cream yet or finding it pretty easy?
It’s … fine? I don’t feel different. And I don’t obsess over dessert or anything, I just really like it. What’s actually most frustrating is how in the dark I feel about how to make the tradeoff between the deliciousness of ice cream and long term health. All the guidelines one finds seem super arbitrary and I don’t even understand really fundamental things about nutrition, like whether junk food is all that bad in and of itself or mostly insofar as it causes obesity.
Oh, the biggest difference is that it’s much easier to stay on my weight road, but personally I don’t mind skating the edge of my weight road. In fact, I think what makes staying on my weight road easy is that the no-sugar rules (including, in my case, avoiding anything starchy – rice, potatoes, pasta, bread, etc etc) require me to abstain from a sizable subset of the food that’s in reach, so to speak. Which is exactly what my Beeminder weight goal makes me do as well. So I don’t think that this experiment is an argument against beeminding weight.
You might like The Bad Food Bible by Dr. Aaron Carroll (youtube video by the author about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8QtIoSuDVE). I haven’t read it, but I love Healthcare Triage and just haven’t gotten around to—
Okay, I just bought it.
Sorry if I am just ignorant here, but how can you use beeminder for a negative objective? I mean, you can only input that you accomplished something, or have done something. No sugar is, by definition, a “don´t do something”…
You will invert the logic and press the button the days you resisted the tempations?
(sorry for any misspelling, i´m brazilian)
You can beemind the number of grams of sugar you eat, or you can think of it as a positive “did I stick to my diet today?”
I just learned that you can input negative numbers, so my objection makes no sense… sorry kkkkkk
Hi @joaoluiz!
It’s not just that you can input negative numbers; there’s a type of goal, Do-Less goals, that allow you to set a maximum number of something (like grams of sugar or cigarettes, or times you catch yourself biting your nails) per week, and then you have to keep your data under than number. (Here’s an example of one of mine, which I’ve made to get me to do less and less of a bad-habit of mine: https://www.beeminder.com/mary/habit)