Where Do You Draw The Line?

March 17, 2009 ↓ 1 Comments

Hi, David. I stopped eating white sugar beginning with Lent. At first it was easy, but now I am dealing with a lot more cravings. I am wondering where to draw the line. I see you eat natural sugars and bread. I guess I am more of a “black and white” thinker—I worry that if I allow myself the grey area of a trail mix or prunes or raisins that I am just kidding myself, and I haven’t really quit sugar—just made substitutions. Does this make sense? How do you deal with this? I read “Potatoes not Prozac” and I feel like the author had a much more “hardcore” stance—I like a glass of wine, raisins in my oatmeal, etc. I don’t need to lose weight—I don’t want to eliminate all carbs, either. Can you offer some advice? Thanks a million!

Identify your trigger foods and eliminate them. Then replace your trigger foods with replacement foods. I can eat bread and natural sugars because they don’t trigger my desire to binge. If I ate chocolate, however, it’d be all I eat! After you’ve identified your trigger foods, remove them from your diet and replace them with healthy foods.

What you eat and how much is completely under your control, no matter if we want to believe that or not. For some people, eating sweets one day a week is a workable solution. Other people only eat sweets when they have friend over. Or maybe only when they eat out. For a while the only sweet thing I ate was ice cream. Then I limited that to ice cream at birthday parties (but that didn’t last). So in the end I developed the sustainable sugar abstinence plan that I’m on now. It allows me to have sugar once a year and that works for me. The good news is that you can do whatever works for you!

I suggest you listen to this presentation which explains my approach to avoiding sugar. If you want to set up a sustainable sugar abstinence plan for yourself, the Stop Being Sweet ebook explains in detail how to do that.

Hope that helps!

(1) Comments: Where Do You Draw The Line?

Esther Dubrovsky
Mar 23, 2009

I am on my way to quiting sugar. But I have a rather limited diet to begin with because I have food allergies. So rather than cut it all out at once I found that the slow and steady way is working for me. I used to add a table spoon + honey to cereal and I stopped, I also added 3 tbs sugar to my tea and I quit the tea and the sugar. So now other than the fruits I can eat and occational dinner recipies that call for a bit of sugar (asian sauces)I only have 14 g of sugar a day. The amazing thing is that my cereal that has only 7g sugar in it, now tastes super sweet!!! And I don’t go through a $10 dollar thing of honey any more!
Thank you for the motivation David!