Hi all,

I've looked through the threads, and I think I could get my best answer here. What do you all use for sugar substitutes? I have taken a low carb / low calorie approach to my weight loss so I avoid sugar as much as I can, including in my morning coffee. The thing is - I love the taste of real sugar in my coffee and I just am not happy with any substitute I have tried. I drink one cup of coffee in the morning.

Part two of my question is: Would you just bite the bullet and use real sugar if it was *that* important? A teaspoon would only add 4 carbs and 16 calories to my day so it's very doable, but I feel like even starting my day with sugar might lead me to crave it the rest of the day.

As I type this, I am thinking to myself "Wow, that is the biggest problem you are facing right now?" LOL!

I appreciate your time!

I revisit this same exact "problem" every so often myself.... lol... I too have never really found any "sweetners" artificial or "all natural" ones (whatever that means most of the time...lol...) that I cared for... I was using nectresse, which I thought tasted ok, but I never really loved it... I used to use Sugar in the Raw and since I don't like my coffee overly sweet 1tsp was all I needed and I even could get by with a 1/2 tsp sometimes... and like you say the carb and calorie count is pretty negligible if you are only using a tsp... At that level for me I don't seem to have any unusual cravings and I lost weight just fine...

Also I'm not sure if you put milk or cream in your coffee... But when I was doing very low carb I found that just using 1tsp of cream in my coffee (no sweetners) gave it a richness that made it taste sort of "sweet" to me, so that would be about 17 calories all which would be from fat... And I've also used all sorts of soy, almond, and coconut "milk" creamers, most of which have some sort of sugar in them, but the carb counts usually weren't that bad.

Ultimately though it turns out I've lost 50lbs having about 3 cups of coffee a day each with about 20 calories in it... Some days all those calories where from fat and some days all those calories were from carbs... So I might have been making myself a little crazy for nothing... But hey, that's nothing new for me... Lol...

I'm not low-carbing, but I have to avoid sugar for other reasons, and I too don't like the taste of any sweetener I've tried. Well, sweeteners that you add to things, anyway. I can just about manage making hot chocolate with stevia if I make it with rice milk, which is naturally sweet and seems to work with the flavour better than soy milk (I'm vegan, so I have no idea how it'd be with cow milk). Apparently some people are more sensitive to the bitterness in sweeteners than others. It may be a supertaster thing.

Anyway, one type of sweetened thing that I do like is Nuun electrolyte drinks. No bitter taste at all for me, or anyone I've spoken to. I need to get a lot of electrolytes into me for medical reasons, but they are generally useful things for everyone. My partner likes them as a general pick-me-up, for instance, and always has one after he's drunk alcohol to help avoid hangovers. The cola flavour is delicious, and is one of the two flavours which has caffeine in it, about the same amount as a cup of tea. So if I find myself craving something sweet, I tend to have an electrolyte drink. A friend of mine tried them, recommended them to her mother who has diabetes, and apparently she finds they're really helpful too.

The best way is to slowly getting used to black coffee without sugar, if you for example use 3 teaspoons of sugar, then try 2.5 for a week, then 2 for a week until you will get to 0. Doing it that way you will not notice much of a difference, and when you get used to sugar free coffee, coffee with sugar will taste disgusting to you.

I'm so with you on this..... I'm currently using a mix of Erythritol (1 tsp granular) and Stevia (a few drops). These are both naturally occurring substances and the mixture offsets some of the unpleasantness of each along. Commercially, you can get Truvia that combines them for you.......

Your mileage may vary

Joanna