June: Beating the Sugar Addiction (End-of-Month Recap/Findings)
Hi everyone! So it’s the last day of June, which means … the last technical day of my No-Sugar Experiment! It’s been a really mixed bag -- rewarding at times, frustrating at other times, difficult all the time … and at the end of the day, I did end up with a few takeaways. I’m going with a different format for this recap – instead of just a recap of how I performed the experiment, I want you to see my thoughts each day of the experiment, as written down in the Notes app on my iPhone, which I used as a sort of log.
Day-by-Day Notes Log:
Week 1:
Day 1: Wow. Already, strawberries taste SO MUCH sweeter when not eating refined sugar.
Day 2: Not having a sweet after meals is strange. It’s become so normal, so expected, that my mouth seems very confused, and doesn’t seem to understand that dinner is over.
Day 3: HOLY MOTHER OF GOD THIS HEADACHE IS HORRENDOUS. I’m definitely having sugar withdrawals, like the drug that it is.
Day 4: Wow, raisins are INCREDIBLE!!! When you don’t have any other serious form of sugar allowed, raisins taste suuuuper sweet and delicious! The dopamine/rewards center in my brain is happy again.
Day 5: I’m still having cravings, but they’re more muted, less loud. Despite seemingly constant cries for added sugar from my brain, I’ve consistently refused for five days now, and my brain seems to be giving up, because I’m not giving in.
Week 2:
Day 8: Ok, Day 5 must have been a fluke. I’m still having cravings quite often.
Day 9: I’m eating an awful lot of carbs.
Day 10: Low point: since all I’m allowed is fruit, my solution is just to eat entire bags of frozen berries at once.
Day 13: I caved for three Starbursts, which were offered to me while volunteering, but they strangely weren’t that satisfying. I can’t decide if this makes me feel better or worse.
Day 14: I'm now having fewer rabid desperate cravings, but more strong temptations to just say “screw it” and get a McDonalds ice cream cone. Because it’s right there, and the only thing holding me back is myself.
Week 3:
Day 15: Wow, this is much harder when I’m home or at the office than when I’m out and about and busy. Perhaps sugar cravings happen most strongly when I’m bored?
Day 16: I realized this morning that I now consider bread with coconut oil a “sweet”, or a “dessert” to be eaten after dinner. I MUST be making progress, if bread with oil is now somehow sweet to me.
Day 17: Oops, I’m eating bread. I forgot that I was supposed to give that up this week. Oh well. I bought the loaf, so guess I’ll just keep eating it….
Day 19: Whoops. Tonight I messed up majorly – someone brought granola to meditation, and I ate probably an entire half a bag. After saying “screw it, I’m having some”, I found myself acting desperate, taking huge amounts, almost in a weird primal hoarding mode. I’m discouraged – I’m worried that at the end of this, when I start eating sugar again, I’m still going to be just as addicted, and maybe even more so.
Day 20: Sugar cravings DO pass, if you don’t give in! I noticed today that I was absolutely rabid in the kitchen, searching for anything on my shelf with even a morsel of sugar in it. But when I couldn’t find anything, I gave up and went to my room … and 20 minutes later, I no longer wanted anything at all!
Week 4:
Day 24: Uh oh. Jenny brought Tim Tams (these INCREDIBLE cookies from Australia). My roommate, Emily, said I had to break my No-Sugar vow for just one Tim-Tam, and I happily accepted the excuse … except I ate four instead of one. FOUR. These are hundred-calorie cookies, and I just wolfed down four of them all at once, in the middle of my No-Sugar month. Wowwwwwww. I’m ashamed. Again, repeating what I said on Day 19 – I’m starting to worry that my Binge Eating problem will be even worse than ever now when I DO have sugar.
Days 25-30: Well, I guess that was pretty much it. The Tim Tams did me in, and I fell off the wagon. The last week I gave in and completely back to my sugar-eating self, for some reason pretending it was July. But hey, I had a good three-week run!
Takeaways:
Temporarily getting rid of sugar might have weakened my addiction to it, but it did not solve my binge-eating problem long-term. I do think that sugar makes me much more likely to binge, but I still binge on pasta, or cheese, or anything delicious. Additionally, now that I’m reintroducing sugar into my life, I know that I’m still very likely to binge on it. This experiment did not destroy that at all. The impulse is still there. It just gave me strength in knowing that I CAN say no altogether.
The experiment’s influence on weight loss/gain is unclear. I lost weight (2-3lb) at the beginning, but then strangely gained it back. Not sure if this had to do with the experiment, or with my concurrent injuries, which prevented me from exercising as often or as hard as I usually do. Maybe it was a combination of both.
Giving in to addiction is merely a habit. This was definitely my most important takeaway. I thought I NEEDED sugar. And let’s be real – by the end of the month, I still reeeeally wanted sugar. Pretty much every day. But I did find that when I said no – when I kept my butt glued where it was and didn’t go to the vending machine/kitchen cabinet to give in -- my body grumpily accepted my decision and 10-20 minutes later got over it. Yes, it’s an extremely powerful chemical force that makes you want to get up and go satisfy the craving. Before this experiment, I WOULD give in, like a zombie. But to just simply say no, not do it, NOT let it own you? It made me feel really powerful. I hold to power to break my habits, one “no” at a time.
That’s all for now, everyone -- stay tuned for my July experiment, coming tomorrow! :)
