Sugar Challenge: Halloween 2006

Hi, I’ve been “unsweet” since November 3rd now. At first it was easy, then it got hard, right now I’m ok with it. I plan to just be without sugar as long as I feel good and determined about it. The more research I do about sugar though, the more determined I am to change my life for good along with the sugar intake of my kids.
My big question at the moment is, what kind of substitutes do you use? I don’t want to use any chemical sweeteners and honey but I have looked into Stevia and Maple Syrup (I love to bake). Then the question arises, do I need a substitue? Perhaps you can write a post about this once?
And thanx so much for such a wonderful site. You have inspired me and I visit often!
sara.

I have been on the challenge since Nov. 1.  Only a few small “violations” such as honey mustard sauce for chicken and Yoplait choc. mousse yogurt for dessert.  Fortunately, neither elicits cravings.  Am so glad to be “back” after falling off the wagon from March-October.

Sara, to answer your question, I also love to bake.  The easiest substitute is Xylitol (nonchemical, in spite of the name) because it measures exactly like sugar.  With anything else, you will have to adjust your recipe.  Some other good substitutes are date or maple sugar, barley malt, brown rice syrup, and blackstrap molasses.  All are nonchemical and therefore spendy.  Hubby and I are currently experimenting with a sugar-free apple pie using only apple juice for sweetener.  We’ll be ready to post results after Thanksgiving!

A big THANK YOU to David for providing us with this forum.

I am just now joining your sugar-free ‘til Thanksgiving challenge.  So if I make it, it will be exactly one week.

I just discovered your blog--what a great idea, quitting for X days rather than forever. I’m a lifelong sugar hound--I bleed Karo--and can’t tell you how many times I’ve sworn it off only to get sucked back in to its evil grip. This approach seems practically doable to me. Six days till Thanksgiving? I’m going to have to take it hour by hour, but count me in!

(Full disclosure: I’m writing this under the influence of a Hot Tamales sugar high--and belly ache!)

So I was only able to make it 24 hours. Poo. (Or more optimistically, Wow! I made it 24 hours! Yippee!) Apparently that’s how long it takes my sugar demons realize what’s up and whisper convincingly into my ear, “Why the #%$@ would you want to give up sugar? What’s the point?” Note to self: Put a list of reasons I want to do this everywhere.

Moving on. No sugar till Thanksgiving, take 2.

If you “fall off the wagon,” just get back on. Less than a week to go!

Hi David.

I just discovered your site and the timing is primo!  I’ve got sugar addictions going back years and just recently, I decided to do without sugar from the day after Thanksgiving until Christmas Day.  So, while I missed the Thanksgiving Challenge it appears I’ve set my own Christmas Day Challenge.  How funky that I came across your site so soon after making that decision.  This is the first time in a long time I have even considered a concrete plan of abstinence from sugar (even short-term).  So I’m reaching out for support.

One more thing that is very important to mention is that I have been sober and smoke-free for a little over two years.  It took a lot of years, a lot of false starts and a lot of pain to finally let go of alcohol and cigarettes.  But now that I have (and I try not to take that for granted) I now want to focus on some long-standing sugar issues.  Mainly that sugar has got me by the short and curlies and is making my life miserable most of the time.  My weight keeps going up and I have a host of other issues-- many of which you listed in your blog pages.

Anyway, I could definitely benefit from your experience and the experience of others in this web community.

P.S.  It’s very early Thanksgiving morning and I’ve been up all night preparing a dish to bring to dinner so I am very tired and wired from sugar and no sleep.  I hope this is coherent.

Peace and Carrots,
timmycee

Well, I made it until 2 days before Thanksgiving!  Alas, the temptation of Tillamook ice cream was too strong.  The good news is that I made sugar-free apple pies for today.  Hubby says he likes them better than the regular kind, because now he can really taste the apples!  Next week I am hoping to join timmycee for the Christmas challenge.  Happy Turkey Day, everyone!

Timmycee, you read my mind. Stay tuned for the next Challenge!

And apple pie without sugar sounds wonderful…

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

David

Hey,

I found your website really interesting. I try to do the same thing almost every week. Haha. Which obviously shows you that my attempts don’t last long…

However, I’m trying a new tactic. I’m trying to get my boyfriend to stop smoking and I found a really good book by Allen Carr called ‘the easy way to stop smoking’. I found it on Amazon and it got really good write up’s. One woman even said that she read it although she didn’t smoke to see what all the fuss was about and since gave up her 6 a day ‘diet coke habit’.

Now I don’t smoke either, but I’ve read it and it’s a great book. I’ve read a lot of books on sugar; ‘sugar blues’, ‘potatoes not prozac’, ‘lick the sugar habit’, ‘stop bingeing’ ‘the sugar addicts total recovery plan’ etc. etc. and so far so bad. Haha.

I know how bad sugar is (like smokers know how bad smoking is) yet I eat it anyway. Like you I eat it long after it stops tasting nice and I start to feel sick, and I eat rubbishy bad quality stuff just for the sugar content when I’m feeling low.

So anyway, this book (which you can apply to sugar as well as smoking) explains that you don’t have low willpower if you can’t stop it’s just an addiction like a drug addiction that you have been brainwashed into believing you need. I used to believe that sugar calmed me down. I now realise that if I wasn’t already experiencing sugar withdrawal I wouldn’t need another hit in the first place…

Like you I’ve tried all the low sugar stuff. I’m beginning to realise that I can’t eat sugar occasionally and it’s like a fix for me. Once I get back on it I can’t stop. I think the sweetner type goods are probably as unhealthy as sugar is.

So as much as I was scared I’m going to stop eating sugar. I can’t have one cookie, I’ll eat the whole box and then some and I can’t spend the rest of my life trying to control it, I’m better off without it.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I really admire you for giving up sugar for a whole year, so why did you ruin it with the hallowe’een candy?!! You were doing so well!

Anyway, if you’re interested read the no smoking book, and if you’re interested I’ll let you know how it goes for me.

I’ve decided on no refined sugar as in cakes, sweets, chocolates, ice-cream, biscuits, sodas etc. And no artificial sweetners. I’m still out on alcohol. I’m not sure if that’s cowardly but I’m wondering if I drank something small with a meal then it would take a lot longer to hit my blood stream and it’s not refined sugar per se. In the meantime I’m going to hope that if I don’t eat refined sugar for long enough then my taste buds will adjust.

I think the hardest thing is other people not understanding and saying ‘how can you be addicted to sugar?’ I’m going to be a lot stronger, if they want to eat poisonous things that’s up to them.

Take care, and hope everything is good with you. Keep up the good work.

Sarah

I have to admit that my sugar abstinence lasted about 48 hours and then I made some rationale for why it should be postponed.  Still, I guess I showed myself that abstinence is possible.

I definitely want to keep trying so I will jump into the frey until Christmas Day.

The biggest fear I have is that if I keep increasing the list of foods that I won’t eat I am going to have a major melt down and possibly start drinking again.  And believe me, my worst sugar hangover cannot compare to the destruction caused by a full-throttle, no restraint alcohol binge.  The truth is that I feel like sugar at least partially placates this primal beast that lives within me and that to take that away would surely cause mutiny.  I don’t necessarily mean that literally but it is an accurate description.

My point is that I fear drinking again more than anything else.

I know the issue is sugar but I just had to let that be known.  It is integral to my success in sugar freedom.

I’ll check out that book you recommended.

peace and carrots,
timmycee

Tim,

I guess you have read ‘Potatoes not Prozac’ by Kathleen Desmaisons. If so please forgive me for being patronising and/or telling you things you already know. Her father was an alcoholic and she has been in charge of alcoholic recovery programmes in the US and realised that 1) the alcoholic recovery rate was incredibly bad and that 2) most people trying to recover tended to shift to eating lots of sugar instead.

Assuming you don’t know this then you might want to try reading her book.

I’ve made it since Saturday (it’s now Wednesday so this is day 5) and so far no sugar. I had a cheese sandwich the other day which had sugar in the chutney but I was out and I figured it was better than eating straight cookies.

Having said that I’m off work today and spent most of last night throwing up and feeling generally like I was going to die. I’m not sure it it’s any correlation with giving up or just a happy coincidence but I’m starting to feel a bit better now.

What I find really hard is other people not being okay with what I’m doing. I think I want to stop drinking as well. I don’t even like the taste I just use it when I’m feeling down instead of sugar. I think a lot of people are scared by someone who is not going to get drunk or eat cake with them. A lot of my life has revolved around eating cake or getting drunk. And feeling depressed. Haha.

Take care,

Voodoo

Voodoo,

I don’t drink or eat cake. Most people respect it. In fact, when I ask for water at bars people think I’m in recovery and just give me water! Since quitting sugar, I have found it much easier to get other parts of my life together. Not everything is perfect, but life is better.

As for the Halloween candy...well, it’s hard to quit forever. Especially since I LIKE to eat sweets. So doing so once a year reminds me of why I stay off the sugar all year long. At the end of a year I found myself making up all sorts of reasons to eat sweets. After four days of doing so I couldn’t wait to stop again.

I am completely addicted to chocolate, especially Galaxy and I cannot go through a who day withour having at least 1 bar of it. When I have chocolate to satisfy my cravings, I eat it, but if I dont have any, I will go out and buy some, and the more cash I have on me, the more I will buy and then eat. I know how bad it must be for me to eat so much, but just cannot not stop despite this.
Even when I have just eaten 2 enourmous bars of chocolate and feel quite full, a few hours later I will still want more, even though I will have eaten at least 2000 calories just from chocolatey snacks.

Please somebody reply with some hints as to how to stop being so addicted to sugar and chocolate! Thank you!!

David,

I’m sorry I didn’t mean to sound judgemental! I’m really not, so apologies if I sounded like I was telling you off On the contrary I’m very proud of you (as I sure you are of yourself, and I hope that doesn’t sound patronising!), I know how hard it is.

It’s been weird for me over Christmas actually. I started off with the idea that I was never going to eat anything sweet again which I now realise may have been somewhat over optimistic for a sugar addict. And I made it about 2 weeks. Strangely when I did have something it wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be and I didn’t eat a lot. I had a couple of really nice chocolates. And then I made a point to remind myself the next day when I was thinking about eating chocolate croissants for breakfast that I didn’t really want to go back down that route. And I had muesli and yoghurt instead.

Now I’m not saying I’m a saint. I had a big gooey chocolate pudding on boxing day. It wasn’t actually that good. It was a bit stodgy and I realise I could easily have done without it. I think I was just checking… haha. I think the idea of it was actually better than the taste of it.

But I do feel a lot better not eating chocolate every day. I remember trying to explain to this guy at work why I wanted to stop (he didn’t see anything wrong in me wanting to eat chocolate). I told him that one day I had eaten a small box of belgian chocolates, two cream cakes and 6 or seven Tunnocks teacakes (chocolate things with marshmallow in them) instead of dinner. And the day before that I bought a box of about 30 chocolates and ate that instead of dinner, and ate all of them. Even though I felt sick after about the first 10 or so. I don’t think that’s normal or sensible. My dad has diabetes and I don’t want to end up the same way.

To Maddy the Galaxy chocolate lover I think the catalyst was really the non-smoking book (I know I mentioned it before). But I felt better realising that it’s a chemical addiction (which I actually believe) and not just that I had no will power. And although I don’t feel ‘more energetic’ or ‘totally amazing’ I feel calmer and more balanced and less like my life is controlled by sugar.

I’m trying to make an effort to eat more balanced and it honestly seems the more you eat healthily the less you actually want to eat badly. I had a falafel burger the other day and I made an effort to eat only half the bun (it was white bread) and I had a small handful of chips and lots of salad and I had water and not coke (which I think is evil). I think it’s about choosing what you really want. I’d rather have two truffles on Christmas day than eat a bag of haribo at work just because someone brought it in and I’m bored. (If I really want a biscuit I’ve started having a cracker instead).

I’m not feeling very helpful. And it’s sad cos I really want to be. Maybe you should try eating as healthily as possible with your chocolate, cos I know I had a tendency to justify eating rubbish. I felt weird having vegetables and chocolate so I had chips and chocolate or coffee and cake. Cake and peppermint tea never really felt right. Or you could always try the ‘potatoes not prozac’ approach which looks very sensible. Ian Marber also has some really good recipes which are very simple.

Maddy, I would do the same as you, maybe an hour after eating so much chocolate I thought I would throw up, I would start again. I don’t know about everybody else, but I always ate if I was miserable and it never changed anything.

I haven’t stopped eating the kind of things I like eating which are unhealthy but that don’t make me binge eat. So sometimes I treat myself to those. So I might have a packet of kettle chips, but I wouldn’t eat 10 packs of them. Or I’ll have cheese on toast which isn’t madly healthy but tastes nice. I’ll just try and balance it with lentil soup with lots of vegetables. I’ve lost 5 kilos in about three weeks without doing any exercise (I know I should!). So I must have been getting a lot of extra calories from cake/chocolate.

I hope the new year starts well for you all and keep trying. I’ve stopped trying to make everything perfect, but I don’t want to eat cake all day anymore. I don’t think I can cope with feeling that crazy.

Voodoo x