My Banishing Sugar Journey
The Day Sugar and I Battled it Out — And Sugar Almost Won
Why I started taking my Sugar Addiction seriously.
Banishing sugar was not on my list of New Years Resolutions.
Cutting out sugar — or I should clarify — cutting the added sugars I consume back to at or below the recommended maximum, was not something I planned to do this year. Or probably not next year either.
Overall, I would say that I’m a fairly healthy eater. Each year I’ve been trying to eat healthier and healthier, for at least the past twenty plus years.
It started with Dr. Weil’s book 8 Weeks to Optimum Health. He started me on this journey. I try to eat salmon once a week. I drink green tea almost daily. I eat a lot of vegetables and salads. Only fresh or frozen vegetables, never canned anymore because of the sodium content. I don’t eat a lot of fast food. I don’t regularly consume huge quantities of processed foods.
I even stopped my six pack of Diet Coke habit years ago. I switched to real soda, not diet, to avoid artificial sweeteners. If I could do this step over, I would have done it again, only done it 20 years earlier. A Vanilla Coke or Dr. Pepper & Cream Soda were my two favorites. But I kept it to one can a day. And that habit I finally stopped about a year ago.
So, I’m fairly happy with my regular eating habits.
Except for sugar.
Now I can’t say that I never thought about cutting back the sugar. Once or twice, I’ve attempted to cut back the sugars. I’ve gotten a book or two on it over the years. But I never got too far with that quest. And since I eat healthy most of the time, I went with the 80/20 theory and figured since I was eating healthy at least 80% of the time, if not more, then the little bit of sugar I consumed every day was fine.
But one afternoon in January I had a rude wake up call.
Or, as my sister might say, I had a ‘Come to Jesus’ moment — but it was about my sugar addiction and not in a church meaning.
At work I had to go stock some greeting cards in a Dollar Tree. I’d had that store before, but then stores had changed around, and I hadn’t been in there for some time. Then I got the store back on my lineup for a few weeks. And Dollar Tree has a yummy chocolate and caramel bar. I hadn’t had one for sooooo long. So, I splurged and got one, and one of the chocolate/raspberry bars too. After all, isn’t two always better than one?
Then on the way home, since I had a delightful Starbucks gift card nestled in my wallet, I swung through their drive-thru too. I’m not a coffee drinker, but they have a Pink Drink that I just adore. And it’s got some strawberries in it too. Strawberries are good for us. Right?
Once I was home, I sat down at the computer — visiting Medium of course — and opened up the chocolate caramel candy bar to nibble on a few squares. Just a few squares.
Except….oh, they were soooo yummy. That chocolate melted in my mouth. The caramel was so creamy and delicious. And I kept going. Just one more little section. And one more little section.
Before I knew it, I’d devoured about two-thirds of the candy bar!
And then…I felt so weird.
Off.
Not right.
It wasn’t a jittery over caffeinated feeling. It wasn’t lightheadness. I don’t really know how to describe it. It was just ‘not right’. It wasn’t a ‘Call 911’ wrong. Not a get in the car and go to ER wrong. Although truthfully, I shouldn’t have been behind the wheel of the car at that point anyway.
That’s it! Put that candy bar away!
I wrapped up the rest of the candy bar and stuck it in the fridge. I probably should have thrown it away at that point. But my mother taught me well. You do not throw away good food. Especially food that tastes so good.
It took almost two hours for my body to feel normal again.
Once I was feeling like myself, my father’s analytical side kicked in.
How much sugar had I just eaten?
I pulled the candy bar back out of the fridge and checked the label. The serving size was 6 pieces and that had 22 grams of sugar.
Okay. That didn’t mean anything to me.
22 grams doesn’t sound so bad.
And at this point I hadn’t been watching sugars at all, so I had no concept of how much that was. It was like someone telling me that they’d just walked 3,000 steps, or 10,000 steps. Some information is useless when you don’t have a mental barometer for what that means.
That was me and sugar. 22 grams didn’t mean a blessed thing to me.
But — remember that part about me ‘keeping going’? I had eaten more than 6 pieces. I’d consumed twice that. Twelve pieces means 44 grams of sugar. Again, a meaningless number to me.
And then I glanced up at the Starbucks cup.
My Pink Drink! How much sugar is in that? It couldn’t be that much.
Google to the rescue. A 24 oz venti Pink Drink has 37.5 grams of sugar. Except I hadn’t gotten a Venti. I’d gotten the largest one possible. Because it was soooo good. And free, since I had a gift card. So doing a few calculations for a 30 oz drink, I came up with approximately 47 grams of sugar.
Still meaningless.
Back to Google.
I found the American Heart Associations recommendations for sugar intake:
Men should consume no more than 9 teaspoons (36 grams or 150 calories) of added sugar per day.
For women, the number is lower: 6 teaspoons (25 grams or 100 calories) per day. Consider that one 12-ounce can of soda contains 8 teaspoons (32 grams) of added sugar! There goes your whole day’s allotment in one slurp.
Their recommendation for the maximum amount of sugar for me (a woman) to consume — per day! — is 25 grams.
My extra-large Pink Drink (47 grams) and the candy bar I ate (44 grams) put me at 91 grams — almost four times the amount of sugar they recommend eating all day — all consumed within an hour.
No wonder I felt so strange.
This got very real for me very fast.
It was time to deal with my sugar addiction.
For added reinforcement, I turned to the bookcase beside me that held my healthy eating books, and started reading what some of the authors, most of them doctors, had to say about sugar.
It wasn’t pretty.
One of our own Medium members, Nancy Oglesby, concurs with the medical experts. Her book, No Kale Required, is one I checked too. She writes this about sugar:
“One of the most powerful things you can do for your health is to eliminate sugar. This is true whether or not you’re genetically predisposed to diabetes. I cannot tell you how much better you will feel. That doesn’t mean you should add artificial sweeteners into your diet; just get all of that excess sweetness done!
As I said in the section on detoxing, the cravings decrease quite quickly when you cut sugar out of your diet completely. But not all sugars are created equal, and that’s the good news. You can enjoy fresh fruit, frozen fruit and even canned fruit if it’s packed in 100% fruit juice and you discard the juice. (Fruit juices have as much or more sugar than sweetened sodas so don’t turn to them as an alternative.”
Eat an apple or an orange, squeeze orange juice into a glass of seltzer but please, please, please lose the sugar!”
Another Medium member, zizi majid, is on the banish sugar band wagon too. In one of her articles, she shares:
“The above-mentioned studies are a short list compared to the numerous studies that link high consumption of sugar to almost all serious diseases. Why do we ignore these studies and the knowledge that today we are facing high levels of obesity, cancer, cognitive decline leading to dementia and Alzheimer’s, and the list goes on and on? The option to take care of our health and not turn a blind eye to the point of no return is our responsibility…
…The choice is ours; the choice is simple. Do we want a healthy life by foregoing what is dangerous for our health at times, or do we not?”
We were already into the new year. But it wasn’t too late to amend my New Years Resolutions. Sugar Be Gone!
I’m still working with this. I’m still fighting the siren call of sugar. I know I’m not going to cut a lifetime habit out in just a few weeks.
But I’m also pretty good at listening to my body. And that weird feeling I got that afternoon is NOT one I want to repeat. I know that it’s time to take this seriously.
If I want to live a healthy, vibrant life for many more years to come, then I need to pay attention to this and banish the demon once and for all.