Unexpected Side Effects of Going Sugar Free

I dropped sugar and severely reduced carbs 4 years ago. It was hard to do, but I made a game of it: I'd resist as long as I could, and then binge. Then next time I had to go that same duration without, plus at least one day. So 5 days, then binge 1 day, then 6 days, then 7 days, then 12, then 13, etc etc. By the time I reached 6 months without binging, I'd lost the craving. 2 years later, I couldn't stand eating it on any quantity over a gram or so. I also increased my fiber intake when eating carbs to better regulate the insulin response. Oh, also I eat a mostly veggie diet, with meat protein maybe once or twice a week.

Results:

I have zero body odor. It might be a combination of using water only to wash, but my wife has marveled on many occasions how I don't smell like anything at all (except the top of my head apparently, which smells like a baby's). I can (and have) gone 4 days without bathing and she couldn't tell the difference.

My weight is down to normal. I wear size 33/34 jeans like I did in high school.

I eat 2 meals a day (breakfast and dinner) and am rarely hungry otherwise. When I do get hungry, I usually eat figs and nuts. I only drink water and sometimes tea.

My sleep is about the same as always.

My energy is much higher, although I still like an afternoon nap for 15 mins. No more carb crashing.

No more acne or skin problems. Another thing my wife marvels e over and is jealous of is my skin softness.

Going sugar-free is great and I am certainly not knocking the overall strategy to reduce wasted/empty carbohydrates. Just understand that not ingesting something that has sugar in the nutritional facts doesn't mean your body doesn't produce glucose, the simplest sugar of all.

If your body needs energy it will convert carbohydrate stores to glucose. Even if you go keto and ingest 0 carbohydrates, you can still convert substrates to glucose through a process called gluconeogenesis.

I say all of this because I always worry about people who go SOMETHING-free, whether it's sugar-free, fat-free, carb-free, etc. Someone reads a person is sugar free but their body isn't exactly free of sugar. They just haven't ingested it and that's a big difference. And I say this because even if you don't go sugar free you can achieve roughly the same effects provided you keep the junk sugar (i.e. candy bars, soda) to a minimum.

I do strength sports and I have 30g of sugar with my workout drink during every workout. My resting glucose is 90 (near ideal) and all of my blood markers are healthy. Outside of that I have virtually 0 added sugar but plenty of carbohydrates from fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes. In other words, living life in moderation can produce amazing results and doesn't require a monastic devotion to be completely free of something.

One last thing I will say is that the human body is so complex. The OP isn't just going sugar free. He is also exercising and making other lifestyle choices. That combined with the power of all of that positive reinforcement and changes only magnifies the other effects he is seeing. It's just too hard to solely attribute a sugar-free diet to all of these positive effects. It's really that his whole lifestyle has improved so he's seeing positive changes in lots of places...perhaps even changes where they have nothing to do with all of this but he attributes it as such (not sure x2 hair growth is really correlated to reduced sugar intake).

I've also given up sugar (it's been about 2 years). Just wanted to compare results.

Hair growth - nothing noticeable. Sleep - still tend to being a night owl. No after-lunch sleepiness - agree on this, I still even eat carbs (no gluten, no sugar for reasons). Sex drive - no noticeable change. Acne - sugar and chocolate used to cause breakouts for me. Always hungry - not really, but again, I eat carbs.

Good for OP for giving that garbage up. It was the hardest of all the foods I've cut out of my life (gluten, caffeine, sugar, sodium nitrites, msg). Curious if OP had the same experience, but I went through full withdrawal each time I cut it out (it took a few tries).

Is there a Chrome extension that blocks any scripts that override scroll behavior? The scroll behavior on this site is so obnoxious I don't want to read the article.