How I overcame my addiction to sugar
josem.co
josem.co
This has to be my reality. If I buy treats, no matter how good my intentions are to make them last, they just don't survive in the cupboard more than a couple of days. I have to leave my kitchen mostly empty apart from: diet soda, meat, cheese, yoghurt, peanut butter. Everything else is just too addictive and I keep eating it until it's gone. I do have other stuff, but have to buy it as and when I need it in a quantity that will only last one meal.
One suggestion I can give if you like chocolate is to buy some 90% or 95% chocolate. It's hard to eat more than one piece at a time without your mouth feeling quite dry, and a 100g bar can easily last a week. After a while, if you have anything else, even 80%, it'll taste really sweet. But it only take a bar or two of the really easy to eat sweet variety before you'll be hooked on it again.
I found that sourdough from local restaurant did not raised blood glucose level significantly (well below the threshold of high blood glucose), looked for a research and voila! here's one. There are others, also showing benefits of sourdough compared to yeast leavened bread.
Also, making sourdough at home is easy and fun. ;)
I do exactly the same thing by not having a phone. I know I would be that guy always looking at it instead of engaging with the real world. So I just don't have one. It's better that way.
While I haven't quit cold turkey, I've found life much much more peaceful since I uninstalled most of the apps on my phone. Email, chat, maps, and music. I think I left notes and a password manager.
Now it isn't trying to get my attention all the time. Even disabling notifications would have helped.
A couple of my friends and I host our own Matrix homeservers, so even that is pretty quiet.
Amateur - I can munch through 100% chocolate quite easily (Montezuma Orange is my favourite for UK people - buy in Sainsburys)
But then I got married, and had offspring. I don't do the majority of the shopping any more, and no longer have absolute control of what enters my pantry. And so now I eat everything.
My wife has the ability to have a pantry stocked full of treats and never eat them. I on the other hand have zero willpower in such cases. A pack of oreos will be destroyed in 24 hours, 1 or 2 innocent cookies at a time. Same with chips. These foods just completely break my brain.
Yet if I simply don't have those things in the house, I have no cravings for them at all.
I have had some luck with using food chemistry in my favor recently though of salting vegetables with MSG to make them more appealling.
However, a more practical approach is to reduce the dosage slowly. That works especially well for sweet drinks. If you have a soda maker, you can slowly reduce the amount of syrup you use.
After a while, your tolerance for sweetness goes down, so things that previously felt not sweet enough feel just right, and things that felt just right before will now feel overly sweet. This will then also help with reducing sweet food.
I would feel sick if I ever tried to drink a Coca-Cola. It’s incredible how much sugar they put in those things.
Kombucha is filling and most times one can is enough to make the cravings stop completely. I suspect it's a combination of the slightly sweet taste with the good gut bacteria.
For example, this Lo Bros [0] flavour has <0.5g of sugar, and only 3kcal/100ml.
[0] https://lobros.co/products/raspberry-blackcurrant-330ml-uk
(At least, as a water drinker, they both taste equally strong)
I'm not sure about the acidity but it certainly doesn't taste very acidic despite the very low sugar content.
In fact, I find even the sweetest orange juice to be a lot more acidic than most kombuchas I've tried.
Plus, when I'm well-rested, my brain seems to actually register when my stomach isn't empty, so it doesn't send out those annoying craving signals.
And after all that health talk, I'll probably still end up scrolling through Reddit for a couple of hours before bed.
Going for a long walk, especially in an interesting/stimulating place like a pleasant city, does something similar for my brain. It entertains in a general, unchallenging way. Instead of scrolling Reddit past your thumb, you scroll the world past yourself. It's not like going for a run where you have to get over a wall; it's easy to just lapse into by default, especially if you put yourself into a walkable environment. Plus, after you've gone about three miles, your body just goes on autopilot and you just sort of naturally keep moving. It barely counts as exercise, but it will do something for your lower back, and it does burn about 100 kcal per mile, which if you keep it up all day will add up. So, I can heartily endorse, for the person who scrolls a representation of the world past their nose, to instead translate their body through the world.
Especially if you have a dopamin deficiency (ADHD, etc.) and you eat so you aren't bored.
I can eat 500g of m&ms in one sitting, no problem, and I'm not even overweight or something.
Food cravings often reflect mineral cravings (1)
1. https://dailyhealthpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/21-fo...
The answer is fortunately simpler, craving sugar probably means your blood sugar is low, or that it crashed after a spike. Counterintuitively, people can avoid this by eating things with less sugar overall or with complex sugars. Requiring the body to break complex sugars down into simple sugars takes time, which keeps your blood sugar from spiking too high.
Nut are crazily high in calories though. Walnuts are 650 calories per 100 grams (and 100 grams are not that difficult to eat!).
100 grams of steak are like 270 calories for comparison (less than half!).
M&M’s are 492 calories per 100g, so slightly less than your figure for walnuts, but I can’t imagine that eating candy is healthier. And similarly, steak has many negative health effects.
Many? There are some, but I wouldn't say many if consumed in moderation, and maybe depending on what animal (elk, deer, vs cow) and how it was raised (grass fed). Most of the negatives are associated with red meat are focusing on saturated fat or on processed red meat. The other type of study is usually looking at groups who have other potential lifestyle factors that might affect the other issues (like diabetes).
The heart disease part is basically what I said about the saturated fat.
The diabetes and cancer risks are generally tougher to track. There are other factors at play that are had to control for. For example, you could grill your red meat and increase cancer risk from that (just like other grilled meats). Processed red meat is also usually included in these studies and that has known cancer and diabetes risks (just like other processed foods).
Many of these are high level observational studies which are unable to fully account for all the factors (because we still don't know all the factors). We can show correlation, but there are things like consumption varying by age group, people earing red meat are more likely to be eating other saturated fats as well. People choosing healthy diets are also making other changes than just not eating red meat.
There have been some smaller studies about stuff related to this. Things like plant based diets reducing high risk interorgan fat. So it may not be the red meat itself, but rather the impact of the red meat on things like that interorgan fat. Or how more red meat in a diet can impact gut bacteria, which we are just learning about how important these gut bacteria are. So it's one factor that can influence that.
At this point, I'm not convinced that we know enough of the factors and mechanisms to say the risk is fully linear at the low end of consumption. I do believe it increases as consumption increases, but only beyond a certain point and likely in some logarithmic way.
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/why-is-meat-a-risk-factor-f...
See also the sources under this one:
https://nutritionfacts.org/video/the-health-risks-vs-benefit...
I’m vegan, but for animal welfare reasons, so this discussion is mostly academic for me. I follow this guy for suggestions on what food I should eat as a vegan, but I’ve noticed he has a lot to say about the risks of meat consumption and he seems to be qualified and have relatively straightforward motivations (I think he lost his mother to cancer or something and says he just wants to find the truth). Everyone is flawed and as you say science is still investigating a lot, and we can’t do double blind or placebo trials with much of this stuff. But I’d be curious what you think of the studies!
Based on the evidence available, my opinion for my own life is that moderate intake appears to have little to no risk if other mitigations are in place (cooking practices for lower AGEs, other healthy diet like saturated fat and sugar intake regulation, etc). I also believe that there are a number of non-diet related factors that influence if a diet is "healthy" for a specific individual, including activity level, genetics, family/cultural histories, etc. To me, the data doesn't support either of the extreme statements - that red meat is bad, or that red meat is good. There are so many factors at play that the best we can do is say that here are some potential positives, and here are some potential negatives.
I eat a ~1lb pan fried strip steak with steamed broccoli for breakfast 7 days per week.
It’s the easiest and most consistent way to help me meet my protein and fiber goals.
My GP does my bloodwork twice per year and the only thing he has ever told me is that I need to take a Vitamin D supplement. But he also said that he tells all of his patients that.
I feel that to make this statement in any genuine way, the author should spend 6 months developing a serious addiction to heroin then attempt to get clean.
I am blessed I have never done heroin and hopefully I never will.
I have gone weeks without sugar and had a craving, some mild headaches and at times been a bit grumpier. That is not even a measurable fraction of trying to get sober from a heroin addiction.
I don’t think people walk away from an article like this thinking opiate addiction is any less horrible than they originally thought, but the usual refrain of “[porn|sugar|social media] is like heroin!” usually presented with a fMRI capture with circles on it, gives me pause. At best, it’s not communicating the actual effect of addiction on someone’s life, at worst it does trivialize it.
To be fair to the author, this article doesn’t follow that usual refrain.
They observed a technique that was shown scientifically to be effective for the more serious addiction and decided to try it for their milder addiction. That’s just good reasoning, and it worked for them.
> The main conclusion from the study is that a change of environment as radical as Vietnam’s during a war period compared to the US was critical for their recovery.
Sugar addiction can lead to obesity. And obesity can absolutely affect the lives of others around you.
I’ve mentioned here before how I’m the only person in my immediate family who isn’t obese. Growing up with obese family members can affect your lifestyle greatly. It’s not fun.
If you want to understand through experience, try a GLP-1 drug. It changes your relationship with rewards, from alcohol to sugar to sex.
Intuition may tell you that "softer" addictions like sugar/food, video games/tech, pornography/sex, etc. are easier to stop than narcotics, but reality doesn't bear this out from those I've spoken with, at least if you have a true DSM-5 criteria addiction to these "softer" substances (which if you have a true addiction, can readily destroy your life and even kill you).
The trivial availability, legality, lack of social stigma/shame and other factors cause such addictions to actually be much more challenging to become sober from than narcotics or alcohol, on average. That said, my sample size is quite small and skewed, since those I've talked to have achieved long-term NA/AA sobriety for the most part.
I don’t want to discourage the author, but i am old, so yeah been there, done that. But avoiding sugar like its evil is not healthy. Nor is it sustainable.
It appears that the author is probably young and single. That may help with this regimen. However, it is best to adopt a less extreme strategy for stress free happiness.
Those should all be rare occasions.
Dieting in an office setting is often quite difficult
You're not a victim of evil, you're just a product of that unmotivated culture.
You aren't really telling us why this is unhealthy and unsustainable and stressful. In my experience avoiding sugar in the past, it's anything but.
It really takes the edge off things.
Yet it's quite possible to enjoy life without nicotine, as it is possible to enjoy life without high-carb foods.
If you eat at home, it's actually pretty easy: Just go to the supermarket with a full belly. It's amazing how disciplined one can be in their groceries shopping when they shop with a full stomach.
When, eventually, your fridge and pantry aren't stocked with sugary junk, it's a change of environment! After that, it's pretty much out of sight, out of mind. The ocassional indulgence at a social event is not the end of the world.
The real problem is that many city people don't really plan their groceries, but just open doordash/flink/gorillas/whatever when they are already hungry and tired. No good choices are going to come from that habit.
Not that different, since people still share billions of years of evolutionary mechanisms, and thousands of years of social conditioning.
At best there are a few different kinds of struggle with addiction.
I think I fail to see your point though.
Are you saying people tend to exaggerate how different addictions are, for example to better sell some new addiction overcoming books or courses?
I was roughly surfing sugar highs for 39 years.
Would highly recommend looking into this if you are a sugar/carb addict like I was.
Fat adaptation is about shifting your hormonal balance and response to retrain your body to maintain a lower level of glucose, and to retrain your cravings and hunger.
When there isn't enough glycogen, the chemical balances in the mitochondria change and the liver mitochondria will produce glucose from whatever they have. This isn't a "decision" just the relative amounts of the chemicals change leading to one chemical pathway becoming more likely compared to another. This is all mediated by the random collisions of molecules in your cells. If you have a lot less of one molecule compared to another, the frequency that molecules find each other to do one thing v/s the other will change leading to different chemical pathways becoming more or less active.
There are many routes for your body to produce glucose. It is "easier" for your body to produce it from gluconegenic amino acids (not all amino acids can be used to produce glucose) than it is from fatty acids. It's the process of converting fatty acids into glucose that generates ketones. So when you have excess amino acids that can be turned into glucose, the chemistry will prefer this pathway over breaking down fat into glucose and this will lead to lower ketone production overall and kick you out of ketosis.
(I think I've gotten the gist of this right but any biochem experts feel free to correct me)
This only works because athletes tend to have pretty insane protein (and calorie!) demands.
If you as a regular, non-athlete person load up on protein (while neglecting to consume sufficient fat), your body will be forced to convert the protein into glucose, and you'll fall right out of ketosis
I found it was just such a pain in the as for other as much as it was for me. Every meal at someone elses house I had to make my specific nutritional requirements available to the host, which then puts them out.
Experimenting with Mounjaro right now + intermittent fasting. So far so good, but only one week into it. I am hoping to use it as a guardrail in case of any accidental deviation.
Except if by "one deviation" you mean a month or more going without IF...
You feel a little hungry. Big deal.
I lost my weight over a decade ago, before "keto" was a buzzword. I've become less strict, because I know that if my weight starts going up, I don't have a problem going very-low-carb to drop it again. It's still calories in, calories out, at the end of the day - but for me, it's a very sustainable diet. I like cookies, but if you offered me the choice between a sweet dessert and another steak, I would have taken the steak even when I was a junk-guzzling fatty.
I never asked anyone to do any special stuff for me after the first few weeks. Someone serves you pasta alfredo? Eat it; one meal isn't the end of the world. Unless your social schedule is very different from most, you're not going to eat at someone else's house more than once a week, and restaurants (at least in the US) can be counted on to have a chicken Caesar salad if nothing else.
Every time I've come off keto, I've always had the intention of staying "lowish-carb" afterwards. It never works. Your body just gets used to whatever it has, gives you cravings before you really need more food, and so you have a bit more and a bit more, and before you know it, you're a full on sugar monster again.
I also think it's worth keeping a food journal. Not even for counting calories or grams of carbs, more that the act of writing it down makes you think "did I really eat that much today?" and gives you a prompt to be more careful.
The rest was just my experience of after I'd got to my goal weight on keto, of trying to stop keto and do something midway between keto and not keto. For me, that never works - some carbs each day, leads to more carbs, leads to lots of carbs. That was never an issue while on keto - I'd just go back to my highly restrictive diet, just that I never found re-introducing carbs easy to moderate. FWIW it's worth, I'm starting keto for the 4th time now. The first 2 times were effective, until I stopped. The third time I tried to be less restrictive than the previous two times, and I didn't really achieve any weight loss.
The "you" in that paragraph about sugar monsters was actually me, but I used the "you" form because I though it could probably generalise to whoever was reading, not specifically you in particular. Sorry for the confusion.
Until you deplete the sugar stores. So like fast 24h and you're back in.
(Keto communities deal with this by preaching an anti-science, cholesterol-denialist dogma, but that dogma has always been driven by wishful thinking).
Dataset needed
Positives:
- PDF is available!
- Nice formatting
- Very well written, very clear what they did
Negatives:
- Not an experiment. An observational study.
- If I'm reading correctly, they classified someone's diet mostly based on 1 single prior 24 hour food questionnaire. This is a bit...weak.
- The LCHF cohort has significant pre-existing conditions (which they do correct for, but their headline is about the non-corrected number)
- They define LCHF diets as being <100g of carbs a day, and define VLC diets as being <50g a day, but do NOT publish any results for the VLC cohort. Why not?
- They then do NOT publish their data!
- BUT if you dig into their supplementary tables, they DO report that VLCs have lower rates of ASCVD than LCHF.
- They have conflicts of interest: "Dr Brunham has served on advisory boards for Amgen, Novartis, HLS Therapeutics, and Ultragenyx. Dr Iatan has served on advisory boards for Novartis and HLS Therapeutics and receiving honoraria from Novartis and Sanofi. "
Anyway, I give that one a C-. Well executed, but looks like their hands are tied. I would not bet on its associations to reproduce in an experiment.
Were I you I would get my ApoB checked. If it’s low, then great! Keep doing what you’re doing! But don’t give yourself a heart attack following the latest fad diet.
I definitely do _not_ understand the first thing about cholesterol and adverse cardiovascular events.
Certainly high on my list of things to be able to model by the end of the year.
I have spent a fair amount of time in the lab (mostly dry, with a little bit of wet lab), so have good foundations, just that's an area I haven't had time to deep dive in yet.
"In pricinple" or actually measured cholesterol levels? Because the latter doesn't happen.
I went back to eating bit of sugar and the same night had a great sleep.
Not sure what to do now. I find it easy not to eat it but the side effects are very difficult to deal with
Experiment with gradually more sugar till you find a right balance then get back to cutting in very small steps.
For other health-related reasons (migraines) I went keto since a few months ago and had no problems at all quitting sugar altogether. Nuts, cured ham are great for occasional nibbling. My sweet thing is a 'keto cream' with a blend of cream and yogurt whipped to be fluffy and topped with peanut butter and crushed nuts.
I do have some very occasional cravings for fries or chocolate, but it is very very rare, almost nothing compared to a normal high-carb diet. (I break the ketosis for a carbful meal from time to time, so it's not like alcoholism where seeing carbs or sugar is a problem that would cause a relapse either.)
Not buying them and not having them around the house though, requires much less, and helps when it's late at the computer and you crave some!
beyond the benefits, I find that my palette rejects anything too sweet now. my wife's family loves mangoes and its one of the first things they eat in the morning. I just can't. grapes, mangoes, lychee.. all way too sweet for my liking.
if it comes to sweetening a summer lemonade for guests, real maple syrup over sugar and it really helps when your circle of friends are also on a similar kick. no one brings donuts to gatherings any more.
Try to find a good light roast, not dark or medium. Light roasts are usually less bitter which is why milk is sometimes added to cut the bitterness.
Coffee preferences are very subjective, this is what worked for me, YMMMV.
No sugar, when I really get a craving for something sweet, I eat about 50g of blackberries with 2 teaspoons of high quality peanut butter. Delicious and the craving stops. Also, about 100 calories at most
And then I had this phenomenon that was so strong that I still remember it years later - I started having fantasies about soda/milkshakes in the middle of a workday. Like so intense/ongoing that the only thing I can compare them to is a teen's sexual fantasies. Mind you I wasn't even somebody who drank soda every day or week.
I found some voice in the back of my head saying "We could literally go get a cherry coke in under 4 minutes, there's a CVS around the corner, or a root beer? Or a root beer float? Dr pepper? We could get two." I ended up drinking diet soda for a few weeks (which I normally find disgusting).
Anyways after a certain point (3 months?) the cravings died and never came back the same way. Your mileage may vary.
When I stopped Keto, entire categories of food become intolerably sweet. It was at least a year or two before I could eat a burger. They're basically a meat cake!
What's "unhealthy" here? LD50?
This is the only mention of fruit in the linked paper:
> Fructose is a simple sugar that is the primary nutrient in fruit and honey. However, in the western diet, its main source is table sugar (sucrose), which consists of fructose and glucose bound together, and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which consists of a blended mixture of fructose and glucose, often with slightly higher concentrations of fructose as testing has suggested humans prefer slightly more fructose as it is sweeter than glucose. Today these ‘added sugars’ account for ≈15% of overall energy intake, with some groups ingesting as much as 20% or more.
> Fructose is also generated in the body from glucose. This occurs when glucose levels (i.e. the substrate) are excessive, such as in diabetes, following the ingestion of high glycaemic carbohydrates, and by high carbohydrate diets.
Similarly, the grandparent comment "Fructose (the sugar that comes from fruits)" should read like this: "Fructose (the sugar that comes from fruits, but these days it's primarily from table sugar and processed foods)"
What you're doing is saying inflammation is bad and then inferring that exercise is bad because it increases inflammation.
The ocassional fruit is ok, but fructose is bad, and smoothies are basically sugar bombs.
For about 6 months afterwards I just seemed to not need sugary things as much and I didn’t crave it in the same way. I also had a lot more control over my hunger, being able to ignore it for longer, so I guess that probably helped.
Eventually it wore off and I was back to being an addict again, but I thought it was interesting because I never expected that to happen. I guess it was a ‘cold turkey’ episode.
I love sugar. Sugar cereals, sugar snacks, and especially anything that has peanut butter. But I've recently started to cut back. (i.e. Greek yogurt with fruit for a snack). So far, about a week in, things feel good and I've dropped about 6 pounds. (!!) I hope I can find more ways to make it easier.
Living with someone who doesn’t want to give up sugar and keeps bringing lots of it home.
Stop eating i.e. fast. The cravings go away within 48h.
Done, solved.
- You're depressed? Just cheer up!
- Gee, why haven't I thought of that!
Fasting wont take away the cravings, if anything it will make them worse (after a few days you feel very hungry and all you can think about is food, then there's a period where you don't mind, then you are starving again, and so on).
And even if it did, once you stop the fast you get the cravings again.
Exercising willpower is an important life skill. Being able to will be extremely helpful in way too many occasions to count.
>Fasting wont take away the cravings
It will, actually. Sugar cravings are very different relative to regular hunger, and are really gone for good within 48h.
>after a few days you feel very hungry and all you can think about is food,
The "all you can think" is just not true. It's just regular hunger.
You can then eat. Just not sugar, but actual nutritious food.
I'd suggest a cadence of one meal a day, or two but not far apart from each other (e.g. 18:6 intermittent fasting).
It is actually and, quite surprisingly for many, easy to do this.
The people you're preaching to have tried all those things. Your advice cashes out into "land better in the distribution like me and then confuse it for a character trait like I do".
Apparently not hard enough.
>"land better in the distribution like me..."
This line of thinking you are describing there is classic loser mentality. The successes of others are always because of "luck".
It couldn't possibly be that they put in the hard work when you weren't looking. Of course not.
Entertaining such ideas would lead to looking inwards, and there's only darkness to be found inwards.
This is a problem that outsiders cannot fix. They have to realize the problem themselves, and only then will they be able to move forward.
So I beg to differ that it's not (always) that simple.
So what would you advocate, involuntary commitment perhaps?
Only eat what’s in your refrigerator, and don’t eat anything from a pantry or freezer.
Sugar (and carbs) are predominately found in pantry and freezer goods.
Many people appear to experience a commensurate increase in appetite after exercise such that they do not lose weight unless they also consciously restrict calories.
Resistance training (bouldering for me) seems to have little effect one way or the other.
If I'm doing High intensity interval training (usually stair sprints) on a regular basis, it's hard to eat enough, my metabolism gets absolutely jacked.
(Exercise is still extremely good for you though!! Highly recommend!!!)
One jar of peanut butter is 3000 calories alone.
Alcohol works on the GABA receptors, just like common sleeping/anxiety/panic pills, the benzodiazepines and benzo-like medication/drugs.
Both alcohol and benzo withdrawal is a nightmare and severe alcohol withdrawal is usually managed with benzos.
I don't see sugar as the root of all evil, the master of all addictions. However, it is easy to quit and, if you can do that, you can quit anything else, including addictive substances. The reason is that, if you are avoiding all added sugar, then you have to cook. It means no more processed food and an improvement to the metabolism.
However, the quit sugar idea does attract people that want to lose weight, which is a noble goal, but not the same thing as wanting to live an active life at a healthy weight.
This means that most people drawn to no sugar are on a keto diet with all that this entails. For the keto diet person all carbohydrates are the enemy, with fat and protein as the allowed macronutrients.
I was open to completely changing my diet as, until the eye-opening experience, I had always put employers or others first and not really thought a great deal about nutrition. My 'intellect' was more concerned with programming languages than what I should be stuffing my face with!
Knowing nothing about the subject, I did want to know why I felt so much better from giving up sugar. So I investigated diet and nutrition. I developed new habits including when shopping. I mostly buy vegetables and supplement vitamin B12. The experiment is going very well. I quit coffee and much else, to arrive independently at a 'whole food, plant based' diet, which is 'closet vegan'. I clung on to butter for quite a while, but cut that cord to reject a lot of the 'anti-carb' thinking that goes with the keto diet.
I don't eat a lot of 'evil carbs', as viewed by the fat eating keto people. This is because I usually have so many leafy greens, legumes and other vegetables that I just don't have the need for a plate full of rice, pasta or whatever else is 'evil carbs'.
The thing is that every calorie has to have nutrition, so sugar is 'empty calories' with no nutritional value. I seem to be fine without it, I can go cycling for all the daylight hours in the day and not need anything more than a few pieces of fruit and a sandwich made with the help of a bread machine.
I don't think that not eating sugar is that big a deal, but it can be a very useful stepping stone towards arriving at a sustainable lifestyle that is not a 'diet'.
Much of the 'science' regarding why sugar is allegedly bad is not as clear cut as it should be. I have heard all about 'fructose' and 'ketosis'. I have also learned a little bit about history and how we came to be living a pastoral life in the UK before the Romans arrived. There has always been conflict between the people that farm grains and the people that eat animal products, with an overlap between the two camps. This is why we have people insisting that full keto, whale blubber only, is the way to go, then we have people insistent on vegan as the way to go, with the majority being okay with 'everything in moderation'.
In conversation I have mentioned that I 'quit all processed food' and that does not seem to trigger anyone. I really did manage to quit everything I was addicted to, but I don't see sugar as an addiction, even though I ate it every day for decades.
I did take sugar for granted and I would eat things in front of the TV without truly savouring the taste. I can't quite remember what those sticky toffee puddings tasted like, or some chocolate bars that I had thousands of times. I would recommend quitting sugar, however, you must be open to the possibility that you really will want to quit for good, to be eating fruit out of choice, and to want herbs and spices rather than biscuits and chips in the supermarket. If you get a figure that you enjoy living in and see cancerous moles vanish on your skin, then it can be hard to want to go back to a diet that includes sugar. There are no upsides to it once you get the health gains.
Hence, before you quit sugar, compile a list of your favourite things and spend a solid month savouring them, as a farewell tour. Enjoy with the TV off, in that way, when you have gone past the point of turning back, you can remember what these things tasted like, to not miss them or wonder.
I always keep my receipts for my grocery shopping. I would not be full of shame if someone were to read them and try to mock my food choices. Everything is healthy.
I have not used my fridge or freezer with this experiment, so they are turned off at the wall. My food is always fresh. It turned out that everything in my fridge was just trying to kill me and vegetables prefer being outside the morgue that is the fridge. My food waste is almost zero, although I did throw half a turnip out recently. Even my recycling bin is getting to zero, that has not seen plastic in a very long time, glass jars are rare and even tins are getting rare.
Sometimes I think about quitting my peculiar lifestyle, to turn the fridge and freezer back on, to stock them with sticky toffee puddings, vast slabs of cheese and everything else laced with fat and sugar. I could toss the vegetables out and put ready made meals in the microwave, or frozen pizza in the oven.
I found that we put the horse before the cart with 'exercise'. I found that, get the nutrition right, and the physical activity comes naturally. But, playing devil's advocate, I think about going to fizzy drinks, sticky toffee puddings and beer. I could get man boobs and a beer gut, maybe with an extra chin or two. I would never need to spend twenty minutes chopping vegetables ever again, oh, it could be so easy!
But no, I am staying off the sugar. However, it is no big deal, I just live in a parallel universe of vegetables with no processed sugar or silly science about the evils of fructose. Sugar is not evil, I just prefer the whole food, plant based life as a 'closet vegan'.
I've never been outside of 15 pounds what I weighed in High School and I was underweight in High School. As a man in his 40s, I'm in better shape than I was back then, lower body fat, slightly more muscle, triglycerides/LDL/HDL better[0].
I eat how a 10-year-old kid would eat if he didn't have parents. All of my breakfast foods (which I never eat in the morning) have cartoon characters on the box. Fruity/Cocoa Pebbles, Honeycomb, Cookie Crisp, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Krispies, Fruit Loops, Frosted Gluten-Wheats, (of course) Cap'n Crunch ... actually, worse -- I buy the Malt-O-Meal generic versions of each that come in the cement bags.
I can't think of the last time I drank water. I drink Coca-cola, instead. At least twice a week I make a half-gallon chocolate malt and consume the entire thing. Sometimes that's dinner. It's the only reason I own a blender. It's the reason blenders last about 2 years, tops, for me -- typically with dead motors or a shattered carafe[1]. I make the whole carafe for myself (the kids split half of one). I rarely eat Breakfast or Lunch. Dinner is something frozen and tossed in an Air Fryer or ordered. I often add a meal just before bed that consists of several bowls of one of the previously mentioned cereals.
I do none of this with any sort of planning. I get hungry, I find food, I eat it. If I'm depressed, I don't eat. If I'm busy doing something else I might forget to eat. When I'd travel solo for work, I'd go through my receipts and find out I ate twice at the airport on the way out/in, and spend an hour looking for meal receipts until I figure out that -- yes, I actually did only pay for three meals that week. Yes, one of those "meals" was an Arizona Peach Tea, half of which was left somewhere and for some reason I felt it necessary to both get and keep the receipt for the $1.00 purchase but at least the expense department will be satisfied ... if not a little surprised.
My 16-year-old son is having success with a restrictive Low Carb/No Sugar diet and I've found myself at a loss as to how to help him, but many of the things the author mentioned (short of a vacation I can't afford) have worked very well.
My observation is that the author's top two items are the most effective parts if you can do the first.
My alternative to the "vacation" for him is distraction. He's a lot like me: an indoor cat who likes computers and video games and doesn't like sports. I focused on things he really liked that were active and upgraded him -- he got a better VR kit and we upgraded the OneWheel[2]. He learned the first few days that when he gets hungry, the best thing to do is use one of those and the one that gets him out of the house is the one that works best. Though we could have taken a vacation for the cost of the upgrade, he wouldn't be putting in ten miles on it every day.
And I think that's part of it: finding something he loves to do which involves a lot of exercise. So far, that's the OneWheel GT (and I feel the same way). He uses the VR. It's about what you'd expect. The few games he enjoys aren't much exercise and the ones that are exercise focused aren't any fun. Luckily he doesn't get motion sick, but that was a pointless purchase for these purposes. And I assumed it would be: I've been through all of the previous attempts to make exercise fun with video games: Wii, every version of Kinect, various others dating back to the Nintendo floor pad with their weird Olympics game, both of which I destroyed in my youth. They usually make some form of exercise less effective while making "wanting to do that form of exercise" slightly more attractive for a brief period of time.
The optimal situation would be a game that can be played at home with low-cost equipment which "people want to play because it's fun to play" that happens to require a reasonable amount of physical exercise to use. Ideally, it'd be something that wouldn't be "more enjoyable with a more common control scheme", nor would physical strength greatly improve ones ability to master the game (so, like most video games, they're more mental strategy vs precision muscle memory) and would be multi-player. I've yet to encounter something that doesn't fall over on all of these points so badly as to make it worse than traditional exercise.
[0] I was a kid during a brief period when they advocated giving children as young as 10-years old cholesterol tests and then putting them on low-fat diets when they (generally) had "High Cholesterol".
[1] Which is only a problem if the carafe is for an ALDI Aisle of Shame $39 blender and finding a replacement is either impossible or almost as expensive. After every expensive blender I owned failed, I'd somehow end up finding a crappy one at ALDI figuring "The $200 one died quickly, might as well save the money this time."
[2] We had a Pint and we've gone through a few tires and about 9K miles on that one. When ridden hard, you come home soaked head to toe in sweat, but it's one thing that he enjoys as much as (if not more) than playing video games.
Here's the problem I have, though. I'm in my 40s and this is a circumstance of my life that I've experienced since I was about 12. When this topic comes up with family and friends, I hear "You can't eat like that, forever?" (I'm 40), "That'll catch up with you" (you've been saying that since I was 25), or "I used to be able to do that, too, when I was young." (you stopped being able to do that at 25). People of certain generations are so wired into the whole Cholesterol thing that even after I've mentioned my numbers they'll still reflex into "but, your heart!" (sometimes cutting themselves off with an "oh, I guess you're OK there, but ..." (and my HDLs and Triglycerides are fine, too)).
I have been seeing a therapist for about a decade now, and strongly recommend it to anyone. I started seeing one after a divorce over a decade ago and when that was worked out I started going about monthly despite not having a "thing going on right now that's prompting me to go", I find taking an hour a month and talking to a "disinterested third-party" about life is one of the reliable ways to get unfiltered truth. Obviously, it depends on the therapist and I've had a few that I feel like I'm paying someone to hear myself speak, but having someone who helps you see blind spots and give you honest feedback is worth the money when you find the right person. I never realized how valuable and rare that is. I had a realization a little ways into my career after I was living on my own: people will almost never tell you, directly, when something you're doing annoys, upsets or otherwise rubs them the wrong way[1]. If they do, you've been doing something so obnoxious to that person for so long that "now it's a big problem" and you may end up discovering you have damaged a relationship beyond repair without realizing it[2]. Most people won't even help a stranger out by informing them that they have a poppy-seed in their teeth out of fear the stranger will "be angry with them for noticing it." Over time, my therapist and I have gotten to the point where he has become a good source for identifying these blind spots (and is quite a bit better at delivering the news).
All of that said, about two years in the topic of my diet came up due to a large bag of candy being visible in frame during our video session. It worked out that I'd had a physical two months prior so I had my numbers handy[0] so after the initial alarm, I remember I got done explaining everything and he was staring at his camera almost like he had spaced out. I finished talking, he continued looking into the camera and after an awkward silence he said, "so .. that's it?" It's hard to get the effect writing it down because reading it, "it sounds sarcastic" ... and I got the impression the expression on my face might have been one of the "fart in church" variety. And after he quickly stumbled over an apology with a weird explanation that escapes me, he said something along the lines of: It's not any kind of eating disorder he'd ever heard of. People struggle with over-eating and varieties of conditions (anorexia, and friends) related to controlling their weight. And in a considerable number of cases the need to binge/purge or fast is something that's done in a subconscious attempt to fight an unrelated psychological trauma[3]. My "problem" is -- in a lot of ways -- the opposite. I manage my diet without any forethought or planning -- basically, subconsciously -- yet I have been within ten pounds of my weight as a teenager (which is ideal according to the flawed BMI scale but correlates properly with other medical tests). I do tend to not eat when I'm depressed or anxious, but it's not a conscious desire to control my diet -- it's, literally, "I don't feel hungry". And when that goes on too long, my body responds by making me too hungry to ignore eating. During the worst depression I've gone through I went from my heaviest to my lightest over a period of four months but it still amounted to being 10 pounds heavier than High School "before" to 10 pounds lighter and in both cases my weight was within the range of "ideal" for my height.
So, basically, trying to fix this with therapy has at least some probability of damaging my health. And fixating on what I eat needlessly adds stress to my life when "not fixating on what I eat" results in my health being fine. I would put exactly zero thought toward this problem -- for myself -- if my son weren't struggling to maintain his weight "following my lead."
[0] I always have to look them up separately to get a better explanation, the doctor usually says "your Cholesterol is fantastic, keep doing what you're doing" and moves on to the next thing. I have to ask for the numbers when they're good and there's no point in remembering them when there's nothing to fix.
[1] Except for the handful of individuals that only communicate in this manner. Most of the people I worked with in security were like this.
[2] The specific event that comes to mind was when I shared a large office with 5 other guys (two worked for a completely different division in the company). One guy, a few times a week, would get up from his desk, grab onto the shared office door and nearly knock it off of its hinges with how hard he slammed it shut. He'd then walk back to his cube a few feet away and resume work without saying a word. The first several times it happened, I thought it was an airflow situation or accident because I couldn't imagine an adult acting that way on purpose. This went on for two or three months before someone finally said "what the hell are you doing that for, dude?" It turned out that the AC chiller (we were in a datacenter) was right next to the door and was very loud in his cube. He was upset with how inconsiderate we were being leaving the door open as we came and went. What he didn't know was that we were leaving it open to be considerate because the far end of the room where three of us sat got a bit warm when the door was closed. We had cube walls setup in the shared office so the noise didn't affect us so we truly had no idea our attempt at being considerate was being received as some sort of passive-aggressive attack. Had he just said the words "could you guys close the door, at least when I'm here, because of the noise" we all would have complied (it wasn't that hot and despite the noise not being terrible in our seat, the heat wasn't as bad as the noise so we "mostly didn't care about the state of the door" we just wanted it to be in a "non-controversial state"). And once that was understood, the door remained closed. I don't read angry subtext and passive aggression well.
[3] I am not a psychologist but I had a roommate for a year who struggled with anorexia. She'd stop eating when she was stressed out and she learned that she does this out of a need "to exert control over something in her life" when she's experiencing high-anxiety. She'd experienced some trauma as a child that she felt was "the trigger" but everyone's circumstances are different.