Doing the sugar research I’ve been doing lately has made me look a lot more closely at my own sugar intake. In the last piece, I wrote about cutting sugar completely for a week from the coffee I look forward to every morning. That week just ended yesterday. More about that soon. 

Here’s what I just had for breakfast that’s also sugar-reduced and that I expect to power me for a cross country ski at hopefully the least screaming-cold time of the day today.

The bowl has in it a mix of freshly cut kiwi, pitted and halved cherries, 2 teaspoons of fig butter, 1 max’ed out tablespoon non-fat Greek yogurt, and dried mixed fruit. Yes, there’s sugar in the fig butter, but fruit butter has slightly (very slightly) less sugar in it than fruit jam. The coffee – more about that tomorrow – though it’s very sugar-reduced.

And then there’s the toast with nut butter (homemade almond butter – more about that too later) that instead of topping with fruit butter or jam, I topped it with a fiber-rich chopped date and a few dried cranberries. The tradeoffs: not as sweet but more chewy. And actually, now that I’ve been through only a week of far reduced sugar consumption, I get a lot more pleasure from the flavors just as they are. I like that!