Giving up on sugar.

I actually never had a sweet tooth.  I was always one to turn down chocolate cake for a big, juicy hamburger and french fries any day of the week.  I could easily avoid the Halloween candy bowl and didn't have to exert any self-control whatsoever when walking past the bakery.

Then I got pregnant with my daughter.  Old wives' tales tell us that when pregnant with girls, mothers crave sweets.  This definitely held true for me (as did almost every other old wives' tale).  I couldn't get enough.  Cookies and candy and juice, oh my!  Unfortunately, this sweets craving didn't end with the birth of my daughter.

With the pinterest sensation of mug cookies and brownies came an insatiable desire to make 60 second cookies and brownies every day (WARNING: DO NOT OPEN THESE LINKS IF YOU HAVE A SWEET TOOTH AND NO SELF-CONTROL OR YOU WILL END UP LIKE ME, A VICTIM OF MUG COOKIES WHO WILL NEVER LOSE HER BABY WEIGHT).


My juice addiction got so out-of-control that I would get a bottle of Simply Lemonade and drink the entire thing in 24 hours.  By myself.  That's 60 ounces of juice, or - wait for it - 840 calories and 196 grams of sugar - or 47 TEASPOONS OF SUGAR IN A 24 HOUR PERIOD.  Hello, obesity, here I come.  Honestly, that is just sick.  When I finally calculated it, that was pretty much all it took to keep me from ever buying it again.

But the question for me was, "How did this happen?"  I can usually tell myself no when it comes to food.  I mean, sure, I give into cravings on occasion, but who doesn't?  Why had I developed a sweet tooth and how had it gotten so out of my control?  In fact, as I write this, my stomach is rumbling and all I can think about is making a mug chocolate chip cookie and washing it down with some Simply Lemonade.

Women crave things during pregnancy.  I'm not sure of the science behind it, but it's pretty common knowledge.  For me, while pregnant with Adalyn, it was definitely sugar.  The problem with sugar, though, is that once you begin, it's tough to ever stop.

Sugar begets sugar.  Oh, how I wish this were not true.  The more sugar you eat, the more sugar you want.  What had begun as a fairly benign pregnancy craving that I thought would end 9 months later has turned into an addiction.  Once I started down the road of sweets, I couldn't stop.  My brain is literally wired to seek out sugar wherever I can get it now.

Symptoms of Sugar Addiction

I've turned to a few different sources for help kicking this sugar addiction once and for all.  The first, Beyond Sugar Shock, has been an eye-opener.  In the beginning of her book, the author, Connie Bennett, begins by illustrating for us her own beginnings as a sugar addict.  She explains all the symptoms brought on in her life by sugar.  I couldn't believe how many of these symptoms I shared.  These symptoms were things that have become so "normal" to me, I didn't even realize they were symptoms!  A few of them are:

• Crushing fatigue


• Headaches


• Mental confusion


• Heart palpitations


• Dizziness


• Depression


• Anxiety

Time will tell if these symptoms can all be related to my sugar addiction (or wheat, or a combination of both or something entirely different), but I do know sugar is bad in anything other than moderation and that it has been proven as addictive as cocaine and cigarettes, so it's time that I quit this addiction for good.  If I experience relief from these symptoms at the same time, then it's a bonus!

Nutritional value, or lack thereof

Sugar offers no nutritional value.  None.  I suppose I always knew that, but I never stopped to actually think about what that means.  Because white sugar is devoid of the vitamins and nutrients it needs to digest and metabolize itself, your body will deplete your own vitamins and minerals from your diet or your internal stores in order to digest it.  So eating sugar actually rids your body of the good stuff.  If you eat a lot of sugar and not enough healthy food, you can then become deficient in necessary vitamins and suffer a whole array of new symptoms (aside from the ones caused by sugar alone).  Let's just pick vitamin D.  If you become deficient in this vitamin, you:

• Are at an increased risk of death by cardiovascular disease


• Can experience cognitive impairment (in older adults)


• Can experience severe asthma (in children)


• Are at an increased risk for cancer

That's just one.  There are a lot of vitamins and a lot of associated symptoms that go along with deficiencies in these vitamins.  The SAD (Standard American Diet) is already severely lacking in vitamins and nutrients, but to add insult to injury is to take away the already lacking vitamins we have by consuming sugar.

Is sugar making us fat?

Like wheat, sugar spikes your blood sugar.  It's rapidly absorbed into your bloodstream and triggers insulin to burn it off.  When you eat too much (which I would bet the majority of Americans do), insulin goes into overdrive and will store everything you don't need right now as fat.

Years and years ago, someone (named Ancel Keys) decided eating low-fat was the key to being low in fat.  Eat no fat, gain no fat, right?  Interestingly, we're eating more low-fat food than ever, have joined more gyms than ever and are collectively fatter than ever.  It really isn't rocket science or a stretch to say that we don't have it figured out.  Eating low fat foods isn't working.  In fact, after my own limited research, it's easy for me to develop my own theory that the fat is actually good (in healthy forms) but the sugar (and perhaps grains) is the real evil.  It would make sense, then, why we're fatter now than ever.  We eat less fat, but all these low-fat products, in addition to including many more chemicals on average than their full-fat counterparts, include loads of sugar to make up for the lack of taste.

What a crock, right?  It seems crazy that a company can get away with plastering "low fat!" on their packages while being high in sugar.  It's as if they're implying it's a diet food that will help you get or stay skinny when in fact, it is exactly the opposite.

How much sugar is too much?

There is no hard and fast rule here, but the American Heart Association recommends that women get no more than 100 of their calories each day from added sugar.  For most of us, that's no more than 5 or 6 teaspoons per day.  Unfortunately, sugar is sugar and it acts the same once in your body, whether it's honey or pure maple syrup or white sugar.  That's not to say there aren't advantages to eating the healthier sugar, because there are (more on that later) and I have no plans to ever go back to white sugar, but I think it's easy to think that since it's "healthy" sugar, it's free game.  I say that from experience.  Unfortunately, it's not free game.  It won't make you skinnier.  It won't prevent a sugar addiction.  I gave up refined sugar quite awhile ago (the exceptions, of course, come in the form of my Starbucks/Caribou addiction which I'm sure use refined sugar) and have only used pure maple syrup, honey or stevia.  Guess what?  I'm still a raging sugar addict.

______________________________________________________

So I wrote this post a month ago or so and intended to add more to it, but you know: life gets busy, kids go through phases like teething (sometimes two kids at once...ahem) and posts don't get written.  So this is all I have to say about sugar for now.  It was enough for me to step away for awhile.  And I did.  For about a whole whopping week.  And then I cheated *justhisonce* with a chocolate chip cookie (yeah, cheated on wheat, too) which lead to a Caribou coffee the next morning which led to half a cupcake later that afternoon which lead to...you get the point.  I've been riding the sugar high for the past two days and I'm so bummed!

Just keeping it real.  I'm far from perfect.  Even though I have all the passion in the world about food, I can sometimes conveniently forget everything I know when tempted with a hot, chewy chocolate chip cookie.  And once you start on the sugar train, it's tough to get off.

Saturday morning, as my husband and I were pulling out of the Trader Joe's parking lot, I told him that I hadn't felt this good in so long I can't even remember.  No pain, no exhaustion, no headaches or skin problems, etc.  But the coolest thing ever?  No depression.  NONE.  I'm not a depressed person all the time, per se (though I've had my bouts), but I just sort of live in this state of meh.  I'm not a generally happy person, I guess.  That's probably the best way to describe me.  A constant cloud of mild depression usually looms over life.  I know I'm not alone.  A lot of friends have shared the same.  Eleven percent of us go so far as to take antidepressants daily.  Depression is fairly prevalent these days.  Perhaps sugar was it for me!  Time will tell.  As long as I can, er, get back on the no-sugar train.

Over the last few months I've watched my fatigue slip away, my energy levels skyrocket and best of all, my zeal for life is back!  I'm happy.  Truly.  Truly happy.  :)