Confession Number 1: Today I had a candy bar, sugary cereal, skittles, a Little Debbie cake, dried mangoes, jelly beans (thanks Gym Buddy Mike!), and teddy grahams. Oh yeah, and a giant chewy SweeTart.
I may as well have main-lined the sugar and saved my teeth the dentistry. In my defense the teddy grahams were force-fed to me by my very persuasive toddler. Okay, so that was no defense.
Confession Number 2: Due to a very entertaining out-of-town friend, I got 4 hours hours of sleep last night.
Exhaustion + abundant simple carbs = Girlfriend in a Sugar Coma (I know, I know, it’s serious… Extra candy corn if you are old enough to appreciate The Smiths!).
Su-su-sugar
My earliest recollection of being a total sugar junkie was back in Kindergarten when I listed “popcorn and SweeTarts” as my favorite 
dinner. Yes, dinner. That progressed to a full-blown love affair with every sugared confection I came across. Willy Wonka was my dream date. Who knows the magic that could have happened if lickable wallpaper had ever come to fruition.
Many time we have broken up, Sugar and I. But I keep taking him back. I can’t resist his sweet talking. And sadly, now there are children involved. It isn’t pretty. Ex-Sugar makes Denise Richards look reasonable.
I feel so much better when I’m not on the bastard spawn of cane juice and bone char (yes, that’s how they make sugar). My mood is more stable, I have energy, clear(er) thinking and a slimmer waistline. So what is it that keeps this Pamela stuck to her Tommy Lee?
I’m a Dope for Dopamine
There’s a reason why we crave it when we’re down, why it is present at every party and why men bring boxes of it when they are trying to get back into our good graces – the simple science is that sugar is a short-term mood lifter. It operates on our dopamanine pathway, the same one worked on by SSRI anti-depressants. So it isn’t just your imagination that chocolate makes you feel better.
The only problem is that the feeling doesn’t last and then not only do you have to deal with the “lifetime on your hips” but you’ve got a mean sugar crash sucking all the fun out of your hip shaking.
How to deal? My fave magazine tip is things like “just have one really decadent bite of truffle. That will be enough to satisfy your craving.” Have these people ever met a really decadent truffle?? If one bite was enough to sate then Godiva wouldn’t be charging $30/lb and having people stealing whole sample trays. Now one bite of poo… yep, that would probably do it for me.
Moderation vs. Extremism
There are two schools of thought in how to deal with the white satan. Groups like Sugar Busters and followers of the Primal Diet, Jillian Michaels and many low-carb diets espouse the addiction theory: sugar is a drug that you become physiologically addicted to and unless you go all AA on it then you will remain forever in its grip. These folk avoid the s word in all its varieties. 
Eventually, so they say, you will stop craving sugar and won’t even miss it.
The second idea is the one touted by the Intuitive Eaters and Skinny Bitches (the book, not the celebs with a permanent Starbucks infusion): make your peace with sugar and it will lose its allure. Your body only craves it because it knows it isn’t supposed to have it. Give yourself permission to eat and eventually, so they say, you will start craving healthy food and stop obsessing about the jellies in your belly.
Same end, entirely different means.
My Experiment
You know I’ve tried both ways. (Not in the same day – that’s just called Bineging and Restricting followed up with guilt – otherwise known as The American Women’s Diet.) First up was Intuitive Eating because, face it, that one just sounds like way more fun. I read the book and completely loved it. I started with eating an entire bag of jelly beans, seeing as they are the favorite of my forbidden foods. It didn’t end well. You can read the whole story here but my basic conclusion was that there are physiologic changes occurring in my body that the moderation group didn’t take into account. (Either that or I’ve just got an addictive personality. Which is probably true too. ) The chemistry combined with the endless variety in our modern eating society spelled death to sugar moderation, at least for me.
So then a couple of years ago, I finally decided that sugar and I were done. I was sick of the roller coaster and I figured if I could just white-knuckle it for a month or two (21 days makes a habit! Or a hobbit. Hard to remember when you’re that sugar starved.) then I’d be in the clear and never look at a Candy Apple Jelly Belly with a gleam in my eye again.
I set the experiment from October 30th to December 30th, just to be safe. 60 days that encompassed Halloween, Thanksgiving, Hannukah AND Christmas. And I did it. For real. Not a bite of cookie or a nibble of candy bar or a sip of nog. I didn’t even lick the frosting off my fingers as I made star cakes for playgroup.
I’d tell you how I did it except I don’t really remember. Those were dark days. The cravings never went away. It was just as hard avoiding the dessert buffet at the company Christmas party as it was not snitching my kid’s Halloween candy 60 days earlier. Finally on New Year’s Eve I said “screw it” and had some pie.
Whoooooeeee! It was like the first hit off a crack pipe (okay, I have never tried crack – or any other illegal drug – but I imagine that this is what it would feel like). My whole body just relaxed and I felt good. Not just good. Awesome. And we vowed to never be parted again. My friends were much relieved as I’d been skeeving them out by staring at their plates and drooling for the previous two months.
This uneasy peace is where I am now. I eat sugar. Sometimes, especially when I’m tired, I binge on sugar. I’m not so great with moderation in anything and that certainly applies here. The above methods work for some people. Alyssa has turned her life around with Intuitive Eating while Mark Sisson manages to abstain quite happily. Lean & Hungry fitness is in the midst of his own sugar experiment right now and was just informed that it actually takes 18 months (!!!) of cold turkey – both literally and figuratively- to kick sugar.
And me? Well, at least I got a SweeTart today.
These are the best jelly beans known to mankind. Just in case anyone was wondering how to bribe me. Photo credit: Candy Blog
Funny that you should compare sugar to crack 🙂
Sugar: 19 out of 20 lab rats agree that tasting sugar is better than mainlining cocaine
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17668074?ordinalpos=4&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
“Uneasy peace”? Bah, you almost sound concerned by your relationship with the stuff. We’re only human, and there are worse drugs. Life is short, take happiness where you can, even if its in bean form (it worked for Jack and his beanstalk, right?)
For what it’s worth I’m more than a little jealous of those who have kicked the stuff, but can’t quite believe it’s for life. When I first started living alone I promised myself I could have Pick N Mix for tea one day. And I did. I put it all on a plate and ate it with a fork and everything. The hangover the next day was way worse than any booze hangover I have ever experienced.
Sugar is a cruel, cruel, but beautiful mistress….
TA x
Oh Charlotte, I completely feel your pain. I’ve even thought “Perhaps they can hypnotize me to dislike the stuff.” Of course I don’t know what the snap-out-of-it word would be, nor do I know that much about hypnosis! 🙂 I have reformed myself to accept no form of sugar whatsoever from coworkers – you would not believe the amount of cake and candy those people eat! I must also admit that when my boss gives me my weekly candy bar I have stomped on it a few times, or resorted to giving it away, but just depends on my mood, but I don’t eat it. I suppose I could say no-thankyou, but he’s not that kind of guy. Let me assure everyone that I’m not crazy – no one saw me stomping the candy bar (in the wrapper of course)! I just figure if I don’t eat cake and candy at work then I won’t make a habit of it…and it’s worked for 6 months!
On the other hand my husband and I get in the car every Friday night to “pick our poison.” Sometimes it’s cake from the bakery, or cookies, or ice cream, or all of the above. It’s horrible! But at least we keep it to once-a-week, right?
Okay, confession over! One more day until FRIDAY!!!
Sugar is a tough one because it’s so easy to mindlessly mow through a bag of skittles (my fav) without realizing what you’ve done.
I crave sugar when I’m really tired or really bored. So we never keep candy/cookies in the house or I’ll eat it all and make myself sick. So now when I crave, we don’t have anything and I get mad, and then I clean something. It’s quite productive.
That’s a tough one. I’ve never tried either extreme approach (all you want vs none at all). I do the usual endless cycle of occasional indulgence, escalation, , stern lecture to self, slowly back to occasional, renewed escalation, lecture, etc.
I agree with tokaiangel–life is too short to totally deprive myself of a reliable pleasure. But “treat” quickly feels like “entitlement”, and the constant advertising of sweets makes it feel like we deserve them like “everyone else.”
I know we’ve talked about this many times and it sucks! I hate sugar. No, wait…I love it. No, maybe I hate it!
Neither option works for me. I can’t completely cut it out because then I obsess over it. But I also can’t do moderation. I can eat green peppers in moderation. Not sugar! If it’s in the house I will seek it out.
I haven’t yet resorted to eating white sugar out of the bag by the spoonful though. That’s good, right?
I had to comment on this one! I consider myself lucky, because the only sugar I care about at all is chocolate. Everything else, I could take or leave. So – Dove Hidden Treasures are my best friend at work. I have one at 10-ish and one at 1PM. (we have a running joke at work: No chocolate before 10AM! :-)) Then I have some sort of low-cal chocolaty/fruity dessert at home (like fro-yo and low sugar Hershey’s syrup, one of my many guilty pleasures.) But see – for me, sugar = pleasure and I looove me some pleasure. I just don’t want to go through my life without it, it’s as simple as that. And for me, I can do chocolate in moderation (ok, the above description is moderation for me – it’s less than a candy bar per day! I think that’s pretty good, right? am I right???)
🙂
I’m still really embarrassed about my confession from earlier!
But I also had to laugh about your hobbit comment! 🙂
Isn’t your birthday coming up? Eat some cake or jelly beans for us!
Sugar – bah. Fat, salt, grease? That’s MY poison. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy the odd cookie or sweet treat; just that I’d rather eat something greasy and salty. Can’t keep potato chips in the house.
Sugar i totally admit to be addicted to it and for me it’s an all or nothing situation. Right now i very rarely have it and when i do i also can’t do the one bite, one cookie thing. It’s the bag baby!! So i have to at least for the most part try to stay away but then…. mmmmmm….. 😉
Normally, I can throw back an entire bag of Pepperidge Farms milanos, or a Hershey’s bar, or plenty of M&Ms, if left unchecked. I did have a chocolate bar recently, though, that was absolutely incredible, but two squares was enough. It was milk chocolate with pink sea salt and goji berries. And the thing is, I kept eating it because it was so good, but I got to the fourth (small) square of it and started to feel sick, because it was so rich. So it’s one of those things that’s so awesome, but really just forces you to eat it in moderation. I wish the rest of sugar-land had the same kind of checks and balances…
sprees.
candy necklaces.
sweetarts.
SPREES.
all fo’ shizzle better than crack.
even Winehouse agrees.
Miz.
I’m with you on this one. I have yet to succeed in entirely cutting out sugar, mainly because there are a lot of foods I don’t want to give up forever. Ice cream, pie, fresh cookies. And I have a good friend who is a chocolatier and baker, and I can’t pass up her food of love. That’s why i make a concerted effort to eat clean the rest of the time and exercise diligently, so that when i indulge, I don’t have to deal with food guilt.
But that being said, sometimes I have sugar crashes and hangovers, like last week’s long run where the previous evening’s double helping of dessert (key lime pie and a chocolate mousse bomb?) left me groggy and queasy through the first 3 miles. And when I ate more sugar regularly (in the dark ages of college and early marriage) I had symptoms of arthritis/fibromyalgia, stomach issues, and no energy. And that whole carrying 20 extra pounds thing.
I had a wild dream about cupcakes last night. I think I’ll post about it today.
I’ve cut out sugar in my tea and all softdrinks but I will never cut out sugar altogether. I love chocolate. I love jellie bellies and I’ve learnt to moderate my intake so I still enjoy it but don’t end up in a sugar coma. I can stop at one chocolate now and savour it.
Life’s definitely too short to cut a food group out. Food should be a pleasure not a punishment
Swedish Fish are my fave gummy candy…my grandma even sent me a 100-cal snack pack of them (a bizarre gift…especially since they were accompanied by a note that said, “EAT!”)
I couldn’t go 21 days w/out sugar but I have been trying to eat more protein lately, largely inspired by MizFit. Been tearing thru beef jerky. That stuff is addictive, if you can get over the fact it looks like human flesh. Nowhere near as cute as little jelly beans 🙂
Oh, how I love sugar…
I’ve never understood that magazine tip about “eat one chocolate truffle and you’ll be satisfied!”, either. One generally just won’t cut it for me. I like large quantities of food. Especially when it comes to chocolate:)
Sugar, as long as it is “cane sugar”, is basically a fuel source…don’t consume it in a fully processed “candy” like skittles…you can’t hope to break the habit, just limit it to foods, yes foods, that are a combination of whole grains and/or a high degree of a natural ingredient..i.e. dark chocolate…tell yourself that you will eat chocolate as long as it is 60% cacao or more…oatmeal cookies, not chocolate chip cookies….and here is the best “sweet treat” of all…Honey Bran Muffins…natural honey is the best sweetener and, trust me, satisfies even the greatest sweet craving…don’t deprive just strive to make your body work to break down whatever “food” you eat….4pack
There are, well, certain times of the month when I just need sugar. More specifically, chocolate. Other then that, I am really not a big sugar junkie (I am a potato junkie!). Was a strange child, didn’t like sugary cereals, preferred cheerios and rice krispies.
Sugar I can absolutely eat in moderation. Bags of m and ms, kisses, and other candy sit around for months (I’m still working on the candy corn kisses I got last Halloween and the mint kisses from Christmas). One or occasionally two will do me. My favorite sweet treat is frozen fruit like grapes or berries and sugar free popsicles. Now salt is my kryptonite. I had to have the fiance literal pry the baked lays and ranch dip from my hands, fold them up, put them in another plastic bag, tie THAT up, and put it away out of my sight. It was not pretty, let me tell ya.
I had a bunch of sugar the other day (peanut butter m&m’s and about 5 handfuls of mike and ike’s) and i felt so sick to my stomach, but immediately wanted more. sugar is the devil. it makes you feel like crap and then makes you think that the one remedy is more sugar. I either eat sugar all day long, or none at all.
Haha! Sugar is tough! Very well written!
Wow, thanks for the shout-out *blushing*!
I think it’s OK to eat sugar. As long as it’s not, y’know, the ONLY thing you eat! I also think it’s so easy to get caught up in the all-or-nothing mentality, and that is actually more unhealthy than indulging every now and then.
I have come to find that being a sugar snob is helpful for me. I will eat sweets, but only the ones i REALLY like. Freshly-baked dark chocolate chip cookie from the cafe down the street? Definitely! 100-calorie pack, chemical-laden, sitting on the shelf for 6 months cookies? Not so much.
Yeah. I’m a snob. At least when it comes to cookies.
Once again, a great post! I really love the way you write and tell a story. You’re honest, funny, witty…I could go on and on.
I don’t have much advice on the sugar addiction. If that’s your only weakness, embrace it and enjoy it. I stopped drinking soda over a year ago and I don’t eat fast food anymore. But if I want a big bowl of ice cream, I have one! That is one thing I will never give up. Just don’t be too hard on yourself. I like what azusmom said about being a food snob. If I’m going to eat something “bad”, then it better be worth the calories!
But oh how I love me some ice cream!
I love to hate sugar. I totally understand what you mean when you say you crave it when your tired. It’s my best friend when I’m tired or “too busy” to sneak real food into my stomache. Also, the single greatest invention ever for plane rides because after the sugar crash its really easy to sleep :p
I wasn’t born with the sugar-craving gene… I’m a freak, don’t hate me.
ALTHOUGH, place a large vat of warm, salty popcorn and/or SALTY, crispy tortilla chips with salsa in front of me, and that is when I turn into a crack addict.
It’s especially bad because popcorn DOES NOT fill me up one bit. Yeah… those little 100-calorie bags, pfffttt, I could eat 4+ of those no problem.
My lips would puff up from the excess salt before I would be remotely full. It’s slightly embarrassing. So is the fact that I pick bars based on if they have free popcorn. Shhhh.
I jumped off the sugar wagon years ago, and it’s been true for me as some people you mentioned, I don’t miss it at all. I find other sweets that keep me from feeling deprived.
Dr. J
Really good post. Sugar is an interesting substance — one we love to hate and hate to (admit that we) love. I can binge on it — dark chocolate, cheesecake, cobblers, fruit cake (yes, the dark kind that appears at Christmas — non-alcoholic for me), and lemon or chocolate pound cake. Any of those could do me in. Fortunately, making some of those with Splenda is tolerable. And many of the “no sugar added” ice creams are very good.
When I needed to lose weight, I totally avoided the sugar. Otherwise, I try to moderate and eat fruit or whole grain savories when available.
Ah I feel your pain, have so BTDT. I tried the intuitive eating idea, mainly via Geneen Roth’s stuff but I just felt sooo terrible on it. At that point I decided maybe on balance I’d rather not eat sugar at all.
So tried cutting it out via the book Potatoes not Prozac, which seems to have been an amazing success. I don’t have cravings anymore, I think it’s because all the healthy stuff you add in before you take the sugar out balances out the crazy brain stuff that makes you crave it in the first place. Definately worth a try.
Oh boy! I am a huge sugar addict!
I’ve tried going cold turkey several times, which only ended in horrible withdrawal symptoms and a serious relapse.
I’ve tried allowing myself any and all sweets without restriction, and that only resulted in me stuffing myself. “Just have a taste,” they say. HA! Doesn’t work with me!
Now, I’ve been slowly weaning myself from my drug. I started a few months ago, and I’ve been able to cut down on my sugar intake without the horrible withdrawals. Surprising to me, but I’m not complaining!
I expect this to be a slow process, but I’ve been eating sugar since I was a toddler. So, I shouldn’t expect to stop it all in a few weeks. One day though… I’m gonna kick this habit in the teeth!
I'm addicted to sweets as well! I usually have a piece of chocolate every now and then but lately, I've been trying to make fruit smoothies. It helps a bit with the craving and I get some nutrition and fiber out of it!