Are you a sugar addict? I am.
In 2005 I vowed to quit and began
writing about life without sweets.
This site contains a forum,
product reviews, my journal,
educational Sugar Challenges,
and the Stop Being Sweet ebook.

How Much Do You Eat?

April 29, 2010 • Comments (0)

I was sick this month with a fever, aches, and more—it was a stomach virus. Let’s just say it wasn’t fun. However, something good did come from it.

During the course of my sickness I drank lots of fluids and ate very little. My stomach didn’t want food but habit wanted me to get up and walk into the kitchen. In other words, the idea of eating would come to my head before the desire for eating came to my body.

For a whole week the thought of swallowing any kind of mass-produced food product grossed me out and, when I did eat, I could only stomach whole and fresh, natural foods. It took a week of twisting belly and weird fever-induced dreams before I began to feel normal again. Imagine my excitement when my stomach growled! That’s where I learned a lesson.

The amount of food I ate that week was minimal compared to the amount I usually ingest. Eating had become a compulsive habit and I was unaware of just how often I “grabbed a snack”. Now that I’m feeling better I’m tempted by all kinds of dishes again but I am doing my best to listen only to the call of my stomach and not the lure of the refrigerator.

Posted in My Personal Journal on 04/29/10 • Comment

Sugar Addiction

April 07, 2010 • Comments (0)

This article contains this video:

Is sugar addictive? You know how I feel about it. Listen to Dr. Lustig discuss this topic at length in this video post.

Posted in Tips, Tricks, Info & News on 04/07/10 • Comment

Sugar Challenge: April 2010

March 31, 2010 • Comments (2)

fool

It’s April Fool’s month. This month it’s okay to be a fool! That means eat as much sweets as you possibly can. If you would normally eat a cookie after dinner, eat ten! If you usually have glass of soda pop a day, drink a liter! Go shopping and get all the sweet treats you love to eat and nosh on them until you feel so sick you could become sick! Gross yourself out! Seriously.

Feed your kids candy and ice cream for dinner and then have cookies for dessert. Brush your teeth with Cheese Whiz. Replace water with chocolate milk. Eat bakery-made pies each night. Wake up to Pop-Tarts, Cocoa Puffs, syrup covered pancakes and a glass of sweetened orange drink. Have Gatorade for brunch. Go out for fast food at east once a day, but preferably for lunch. Supersize everything and don’t drink diet sodas, get the HFCS sweetened stuff.

In removing sweets from my diet, I once spent some time purposefully overeating my trigger foods (chocolate covered pretzels, mmmmmm!) to the point where I’d feel nauseous. The result was that I began to create a negative association with the tasty treats I previously loved so much. In fact, when I looked at them in the store my first feeling was repulsion because they had made me feel ill so many times.

So go ahead, be a fool! Eat like a fool! Spend your entire savings on candy. Do it for a whole month. You know you want to. This is it. Summer is coming and that means beach body madness…

Posted in Sugar Challenge on 03/31/10 • Comment

Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution

March 29, 2010 • Comments (1)

The following videos are the first two episodes of the television show Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. The impassioned chef, TV personality and best-selling author is determined to take on the high statistics of obesity, heart disease and diabetes in this country, where our nation’s children are the first generation not expected to live as long as their parents. Oliver is inviting viewers to take a stand and change the way America eats, in our home kitchens, schools and workplaces, with this thought-provoking new series.

Episode 101

Episode 102

Posted in Tips, Tricks, Info & News on 03/29/10 • Comment

Try Removing Sweets One-At-A-Time

March 28, 2010 • Comments (0)

Here’s a tip for removing sweets from your diet: start by cutting out one thing for one month. Let’s say you typically binge on cookies and ice cream. Cut out the cookies. Simple, right? If you worry that you’ll end up eating other things, you’re correct. Cutting out the cookies will create a hole in your eating rituals where the cookies once were. From there you’ll have to either go without (difficult) or replace the cookies with something new. The trick is to replace the cookies with something new that doesn’t contain sugar. If you continued to eat ice cream but removed the cookies, then you’ll easily eat a little extra ice cream that month and that’s not the end of the world.

No Cookies

Most people have a negative reaction to this idea. They think it’s crazy because they’re afraid they’ll eat more ice cream (or whatever it is they like to binge on) and so they don’t do anything at all. People, especially sugar addicts, don’t like changes to their sweet rituals. I sure don’t. But the argument that cutting out cookies will cause you to eat more ice cream is a silly one. Chances are you’ll eat enough added sugars outside of your cookies and ice cream experiment to more than make up for the lost sugars you won’t intake from the lack of eating cookies.

Let’s say you consume four gallons of ice cream and four boxes of cookies per month. You cut out the cookies and now you eat five gallons of ice cream that month, what has changed? Not much. But what has happened is you’ve disrupted your patterns and you will have noticed what role the cookies play in your life. And after a month without cookies it’s a heck of a lot easier to continue with the experiment for a second month.

Let’s imagine you’ve cut out cookies. You’ve noticed that you don’t just eat cookies at home in front of the TV like you thought you did. You also notice that you liked to eat cookies at work, in the car, and while cooking dinner. Now you’ve got some pretty important information about yourself and you start a second month of experimentation by cutting out the ice cream.

Now you’ve only got two restrictions for the second month—no cookies and no ice cream. What’s gonna happen? You’ll end up eating other things because there’s now a hole in your diet where the cookies and ice cream used to be. Suddenly you’re hungry and you need to fill that void. What do you eat in front of the television, at the movies, in the car, or while cooking dinner? Something else. What that something else is depends on you.

Some folks will turn to another form of sweets. Now you’re eating cake or pie. So what?! You were eating ice cream and cookies. Now you go a third month and cut out the next food (pie or whatever). Obviously this process takes time. Changing your eating habits always takes time. By cutting out one a thing at a time you can more easily manage the process and see the changes happen slowly. If cut out all of your trigger foods at once I recommend you read Stop Being Sweet so that you can follow the steps outlined in the book. Keep in mind, you can always simply stop eating sugar without buying a book, reading a website, or consulting anything. You could simply stop being sweet right now.

Posted in Tips, Tricks, Info & News on 03/28/10 • Comment