Sugar free for as long as you please

[scantee]

I’ve long seen the ‘alcohol free for as long as you please’ thread floating around and while I do drink I don’t really feel the need to quit. I don’t have a craving or attachment to alcohol and if I needed to quit fully tomorrow for some sort of health reason it really wouldn’t be that hard for me.

Sugar, however, is a different story. I absolutely crave sugar. I eat something sweet every single day. Should I go without sugar for a day I genuinely feel like it is a loss. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not binging, these are pretty small portions. Overall, I eat very well and am in great health. But it bothers me how much I crave sugar and I’d like to stop those cravings.

So I’m going to start by going sugar free for at least a week. Long-term I don’t plan to cut sugar out of my life entirely. My goal is to no longer crave sugar or eat it every day. I think I’ll be able to enjoy sweets more if I eat them less often. It’s difficult to know what counts as sugar. For my sugar fast, I won’t cut out fruit but I will cut out basically everything else (anything with sugar, honey, maple syrup, or an artificial sweetener). I may push the fast longer if I’m still having cravings after a week. Then I’ll need to do some noodling about what a reasonable amount of sugar is for me. I want to be about to enjoy and celebrate with sweets on special occasions but I don’t want sweets to be a daily thing for me. I don’t know what constitutes as a ‘special occasion’ yet.

I welcome anyone who wants to join me on this path of breaking the attachment to sugar!

[secondcor521]

It’s difficult to know what counts as sugar.

Indeed.  You probably know this, but it seems that every processed food in a typical grocery store has a sugar of some kind, often as one of the top four ingredients.  Glucose, high fructose corn syrup, sucrose, etc.

I'm not sure if natural matters, either.  I get equally bad sugar reactions (throat clearing, appetite enhancement, napping, irritability, joint pain) if I eat an apple as if I eat sugar.

I try to follow the rule of "no added sugar", so I've stopped adding sugar to my tea and my cereal.  I haven't had a soft drink in ages.

I do like ice cream, though; it doesn't seem to give me as many of the negative effects even though of course there is plenty of sugar in there.  I think I don't have sugar cravings except for ice cream.  (I know.  "Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how'd you enjoy the play?")

As far as your "special occasion" comment goes, I'm trying to move to an attitude where food is not celebratory or a reward for anything and is instead just fuel for my body.  If I start wrapping in things like rewards, boredom, social cues, fatigue, and so forth, then that moves me away from my "eat when hungry, stop when full" mantra.  Those other things create - for me at least - a relationship with food which is less healthy.

[Tigerpine]

I whole-heartedly recommend looking up the work of Dr. Robert Lustig on the health effects and metabolism of sugar.

[scantee]

Day one of being sugar free complete. My sugar cravings were worst mid-afternoon. I made sure to eat an especially large dinner and lunch in the hopes that feeling full would lessen any cravings. That worked well for dinner but not so much for lunch. I realize how much I rely on something sweet to have a sense of completeness after a meal. Without that, I spent most of the afternoon snacking in search of that feeling. A big part of that is just habit: I’m so used to having a sweet after a meal that I mentally perseverate on times when I don’t. Hopefully that feeling subsided quickly.

I whole-heartedly recommend looking up the work of Dr. Robert Lustig on the health effects and metabolism of sugar.

I read his work awhile back—maybe ten years ago— but I’ll have to revisit it. I could use some behavioral tricks to make the transition to sugar-life easier.

It’s difficult to know what counts as sugar.

As far as your "special occasion" comment goes, I'm trying to move to an attitude where food is not celebratory or a reward for anything and is instead just fuel for my body.  If I start wrapping in things like rewards, boredom, social cues, fatigue, and so forth, then that moves me away from my "eat when hungry, stop when full" mantra.  Those other things create - for me at least - a relationship with food which is less healthy.

By ‘special occasion’ I’m thinking less of rewards for myself and more that if I go to a birthday party (or any other celebration) and there is cake I want to be able to join and have a small piece without overthinking it too much. For better or worse, sweets are a major way that people celebrate events and I don’t want my sugar-lite lifestyle to mean I can never partake in that way. Ideally, I’ll get to the point where I only eats sweets on those occasions or if I’m having a special meal. I’ll probably count eating out at a restaurant as a special meal because that’s not something I do too often so it does feel unique to me.

[Metalcat]

I have identical sugar cravings if I eat it regularly. They're aggressive.

However, I learned to manage them decades ago. If they pop up, I go sugar free for 6 weeks. After that, I can have sugar whenever I want as long as I never have it two days in a row and never more than twice a week.

As long as I stick to that, I can take or leave sugar and more often prefer to leave it. If the cravings flare up again, another 6 weeks takes care of it. If I eat it a few days in a row or too frequently, that's it, the cravings come raging back.

By doing this, I've spent most of the last 20 years generally indifferent to sugar.

[scantee]

I have identical sugar cravings if I eat it regularly. They're aggressive.

However, I learned to manage them decades ago. If they pop up, I go sugar free for 6 weeks. After that, I can have sugar whenever I want as long as I never have it two days in a row and never more than twice a week.

As long as I stick to that, I can take or leave sugar and more often prefer to leave it. If the cravings flare up again, another 6 weeks takes care of it. If I eat it a few days in a row or too frequently, that's it, the cravings come raging back.

By doing this, I've spent most of the last 20 years generally indifferent to sugar.

Yeah, as I get into this I’m realizing that a week might not be enough for my sugar fast. I’m several days into it and still have cravings, although it’s lessening with each day. I’ll reassess on Wednesday but will likely extend it another week. It’s strange because I actually don’t like foods that super, cloyingly sweet. I often cut down on the sweetener in recipes I make, but even with that I still crave some type of sweetness in my food even if it just a slight hint.