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.

The Center for Consumer Freedom - Part 1

December 07, 2009 • Comments (0)

My Year Without recently turned me onto a website called SweetScam.com. It’s purpose is to teach people that High Fructose Corn Syrup is not the cause of obesity. Truth is, I have to agree with them. HFCS doesn’t make people fat. People who lead a sedentary lifestyle and eat too much junk food laced with HFCS make themselves fat. So, who’s to blame? According to this commercial, there’s no cause for a case.

Meanwhile, you can’t turn a corner without someone slapping the soda out of your hands on a hot day, smashing your food at a diner or stomping on your hot dog in the street.

Both ads came from the Center for Consumer Freedom. According to their about page, the center is a full non-profit organization dedicated to… something. I can’t tell what exactly. They say, “Consumer freedom is the right of adults and parents to choose how they live their lives, what they eat and drink, how they manage their finances, and how they enjoy themselves.”

Their YouTube page says, “The Center for Consumer Freedom is a nonprofit watchdog group, protecting consumer choices and promoting personal responsibility.”

What’s more, if you look at their YouTube page, one of their favorite video is a mean spirited parody of a video starring Paris Hilton and a tofu/alfa sprout sandwich. Kind of a strange pick for a large non-profit interested in helping me make the right food choices for me and my family. Wait—they never said they were going to help me make the right choice. They just said they would make me responsible for my choice as to what I feed myself and my family.

Personal responsibility. We, the consumers, are responsible for what we put in our mouths. If we want to buy a boat load of junk food and eat it, then so be it! We’re free to do so. However, I do feel that we should have a right to know everything that’s in our food and that includes the labeling of genetically modified foods. It doesn’t need to be a warning, just an indication.

Consumer freedom should include consumer education and transparency. However, the Center for Consumer Freedom says their funders are afraid of radical activists and that’s why they don’t disclose their list of funders. I, as a consumer who believes in freedom, would love to know who funds this organization. That would make a big difference in how I feel about them. So I did a search.

On the website Consumer Deception it says the following:

Rick Berman founded and runs a trio of shadowy tax-exempt food, tobacco, and beverage industry front groups. For a hefty fee, these nonprofit organizations hire Berman as executive director. Berman then uses his own privately owned public relations company to do work for the nonprofit organization. In this way, Berman channels between 49 and 79 percent of the donations given to these nonprofit groups into his own pocket. In 1998, this amounted to more than $1 million for just one of these groups.

The Center for Consumer Freedom is one of Rick Berman’s tax-excempt groups. (Check the Consumer Deception webpage for interesting quotes and source links about the Center for Consumer Freedom.)

We as consumers have freedom. What we need now is reliable information. The HFCS people are always reacting to accusations that their product promotes obesity. They do not advocate a SuperSize Me style diet. Moderation is their motto.

Let’s face it. EVERYONE KNOWS THAT TOO MUCH SUGAR IS BAD FOR US or else we’d eat nothing but junk all day everyday. Believe me, I’ve tried to live on sugar and it’s just not sustainable. I’m sure people have tried to live on cigarettes and found the same thing. No matter if you believe sugar is the devil or not, it always comes back to personal responsibility. What you put in your mouth is your choice. Make it a good one.

Center for Consumer Freedom: Part 2
High Fructose Corn Syrup Commercials Cause Controversy

Posted in Tips, Tricks, Info & News on 12/07/09 • Comment

Should You Keep Sweets At Home?

December 05, 2009 • Comments (5)

You made it through the day without candy. You didn’t have soda at lunch. You said no to sharing a chocolate bar with your friend. You get home from work and you’re tired from a long day.

Even though you’re not hungry, you still open the kitchen cupboard. There, on the shelf is a box of sweets. You don’t need them and you don’t want them but you know they’ll make a great end-of-the-day relaxation device.

“I made it through the whole day, I can have one thing at the end of the night,” you tell yourself.

Two hours later the whole box is gone, you’re about to go to bed and you feel awful.

The answer? Don’t keep sweets at home. The reason is because sweets are available to you all day every day. Everywhere you go sugar is there. Waiting. It’s there when you’re strong and it’s there when you’re weak. Not everyone is born strong. Some of us have to work at it.

Your willpower is like a muscle. You need to flex it. You start small and increase over time. Doing so makes you stronger.

With sugar, you have to remove the hardest stuff from your diet. So let’s say you remove all of the candy from your house. When you’re hungry you either have to go out to get candy or figure out something else to eat or do.

Next you go to work, or to wherever, and there’s candy. They have it in a bowl at the office. You can purchase it next to the cash register at nearly any large retail chain. Everywhere you go you are tempted to want to buy and eat candy. With each successfully refused temptation your are basically doing a repetition, just like curling a barbell. The more successful repetitions you do the stronger your willpower gets. But you must be careful!

You can overdo it when lifting weights. Go to any gym or read any fitness book and they’ll tell you to workout and then give your muscles a rest. That’s just what you’re doing when you take all of the junk food out of your house. You’re giving your willpower a rest. You’re allowing yourself to reflect on a day of no sweets. You’re not tempting yourself in your own home. And, most of all, you’re giving yourself a break form the relentlessly constant workout that is saying no to sweets.

Posted in Tips, Tricks, Info & News on 12/05/09 • Comment

What Can You Eat When You Stop Being Sweet?

December 02, 2009 • Comments (0)

Many people ask me what’s okay to eat. It is up to you to figure out where you draw the line. That’s what it means to Stop Being Sweet. It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing. What works for me might not work for you.

There are many foods that people might be surprised to know I eat. For instance, I still eat bread. I eat bagels from time to time. I eat pasta and rice. I eat fruit and fruit smoothies. I do this because I chose to stop being sweet instead of trying to quit sugar. Quitting sugar might be impossible and I’ve never met anyone who really quit sugar—nobody.

For the record, I do not eat (but for once a year) candy, ice cream, cookies, cake, brownies, or any of the “fun” sweet stuff that I’d still-to-this-day get the desire to spend an afternoon consuming. I avoid refined sugar unless it comes as an ingredient in bread in which case I choose the healthiest bread I can find. In Portland we have Dave’s Killer Bread which is a favorite of many. I also like Vita Bee which Oregonians can find at Fred Meyer stores. Those are two decent sliced breads that do not contain High Fructose Corn Syrup.

So, to Stop Being Sweet is not all or nothing. It’s fundamentally about identifying and avoiding your trigger foods, breaking and replacing your negative behavior patterns.

Stop Being Sweet is not a diet, it’s a movement! If you want a prescribed diet, see a nutritionist or doctor. When you stop being sweet you learn about your behavior around food and YOU decide what you will or won’t eat of your own volition.

Posted in Tips, Tricks, Info & News on 12/02/09 • Comment

How to Stop Sugar Bingeing

November 30, 2009 • Comments (1)

I am no doctor and so I am offering my opinion from experience. I have managed to stop bingeing on sugar, but I still binge now and again (on sugar free foods).

Bingeing is a result of something. If you weren’t bingeing on sugar, you’d be doing it with something else. Gambling, gaming, sex, drugs, alcohol, knitting, etc. Obviously some things are better to binge on than others. However, knitting doesn’t have a chemical physical effect on your body the way ingesting sugar does. So yes, sugar can call out to you. It can wake you up in the middle of the night. It can sneak into your car with you on your way to work. It will sit in your pocket while you visit the dentist. And sugar will always be there waiting for you if you chose to abandon it. Sugar is everywhere and it’s calling your name. The trick is to figure out what is making you want to hear the call.

There are a thousand other things calling out to you right this minute—other industries and products that desperately want your time and money. Why is it that you can ignore them and you choose sugar?

Ask yourself:

1. What is it that makes you want to binge?

Next time you binge, write down everything that happened just prior to your binge. Are you celebrating? Beating yourself up? Bored? Take time and really examine why you are bingeing. Chances are—if you allow yourself to face facts—you know exactly why.

2. What is is that attracts you to sugar as opposed to any other substance or activity?

When you binge, why do you choose sugar? Is it because you’re sober and sugar is acceptable? Is it because you learned how to eat sweets when you were a kid? Why not go running instead? Binge-run ten miles! Take a walk. Binge-walk around the block twenty times. Binge-bike ride. Binge-knit a few sweaters. Does bingeing have to be something you do to your own body?

It’s not easy to change your ways but it’s also not impossible. If you want to stop bingeing you have to start examining. You’re not a bad person. Sugar isn’t bad. What is bad (for you) is the result of bingeing on sugar. If you manage to remove the sugar from bingeing but never figure out the origins of your binges, then you will transfer your binge. This may not be so bad if you manage to transfer your bingeing behavior to earning millions in stock market binges. But, chances are you’ll end up eating, smoking, drinking, playing video games or doing something worse.

Examine yourself and answer the questions above. And whatever you do, don’t forget that bingeing is your choice and you have control over it. Bring the issues back into your body, deal with them, and put the sugar outside of yourself. Good luck!

Posted in Tips, Tricks, Info & News on 11/30/09 • Comment

Sugar Challenge: Nov. & Dec. 2009

November 26, 2009

To all those who are celebrating today, Happy Thanksgiving!

Congratulations to everyone who made it through the last sugar challenge — from Halloween to Thanksgiving without eating sweets. If you tried but didn’t make it, that’s cool too. Nobody gets it right the first time and you have another chance.

From Thanksgiving (or right now depending on when you read this) until New Year’s Eve on December 31st, eat no sweets. Wait! Wait! Hear me out before you bail out.

I understand that asking some people to go without sugar during the holidays would be like asking pro football players to do the Super Bowl without a football. So for those of you who absolutely must eat dessert on your chosen holiday, then make that day a sugar day and avoid sweets all other days. How’s that sound?

If you at least manage to reduce the amount of junk food that you eat over the holidays then you’ve done a good thing.

Posted in Sugar Challenge on 11/26/09