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.