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Four realistic steps to end a dangerous, health-robbing sugar addiction at your own pace without debilitating detox symptoms or discomfort.
Sugar addiction is a very real and growing problem that has the potential to steal your health just as much as other more high profile dependency issues. Check out this email from Regina asking for help.
Dear Sarah, I’m sure you get lots of emails every day but I sure hope you can give me some advice. I’m 52 years old and a horrific sugar addict. At six weeks old, my mother started me on chocolate milk and other than very short periods of time, I don’t think I have been without sugar. It doesn’t matter what form it is in…just have sugar. This morning I told a friend that I could be rolled in chocolate and be happy!
So, you see my problem. Please help me get off sugar. Even typing that makes me start shaking and looking for my next fix!! I’m working very hard to change our eating habits. We grow almost all of our food…veggies, beef, pork, eggs, chicken, milk. This week I started making our butter, yogurt, etc. and hope to be making hard cheeses soon. Can you help a middle-aged, over weight, grandmother improve her health? Thank you so much, Regina
Regina, I can relate to your situation. I used to be a pretty dedicated sugar junkie myself back in my 20’s. I was the gal who was scarfing down the Snickers bar (King Size, no less!) at 3 pm every day at my desk while I worked a stressful, travel packed, restaurant loaded corporate lifestyle.
A box of donuts on the conference room table was my idea of a good start to the day!
Even after I had the good sense to quit that career and start working from home in 1996, I still had trouble conquering the sugar monster.
Not surprisingly, I was hypoglycemic from the misguided but supposedly “healthy” low-fat lifestyle I was following. Despite eating organic fruits, veggies, and meats much of the time, all that sugar made me a nervous wreck not to mention incredibly moody from seesawing blood sugar.
I’m happy to say that my sugar addiction days are long behind me and while I do still look longingly at a box of Dunkin Donuts, I pass them by. While I do give in and eat one bite-sized munchkin from time to time, I have found the hard way (refined sugar gives me such a nasty headache!) that choosing to eat none at all is far easier than indulging even just a bite or two!
So, how did I do it? How did I slay the sugar monster and keep it at bay for so many years?
Here’s the protocol for slaying a sugar addiction for good without any nasty detox symptoms taking your down for a week. I’m sure there are other approaches that would work just fine too. Here’s what worked for me and has enabled me to stay sugar addiction-free for many years.
How to End Sugar Addiction for GOOD
Below are the four steps for ending a sugar addiction for the long haul. It is important to note that how long each step takes is completely up to you. There is no hard and fast schedule for completion.
The point is to continue to make progress even if one step takes a bit longer than the others. And, if you have a setback, that isn’t the end of the world. You can continue to move forward. Progress, not perfection is the ultimate goal!
Step 1: Replace ALL Refined Sugar with Natural Sweeteners
This step means exactly what it says. You must get rid of all the white sugar and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in your home wherever it may lurk and replace it with natural, whole forms of sugar like honey, maple syrup, coconut sugar and sucanat (whole cane sugar). Do not use agave as it is highly processed.
Don’t forget condiments .. they are a big source of HFCS. Replace them with condiments from the health food store that taste just as good and don’t have some form of refined sugar as the main ingredient.
Not ready to get rid of soda entirely? Then buy soda only from the health food store! There are brands available there that use unrefined cane sugar instead of HFCS. These sodas taste terrific. You won’t miss a thing taste and satisfaction-wise by drinking them, I can assure you.
Stir sucanat or coconut sugar into your tea or coffee instead of white sugar. Only whole, unprocessed sweeteners make the cut here.
Replace those candy bars with healthfood store versions that use whole cane sugar instead of refined white sugar as the sweetener.
Whatever you do, DON”T replace the refined sugars with artificial sweeteners.
Studies have shown that folks who consume artificial sweeteners have more sweet cravings than folks who just eat the sugar in its natural form!
Be aware that you are going to have to start reading labels to complete this step. Refined sugar is hidden everywhere in processed foods!
The goal in this step is not to reduce sugar consumption but simply to replace it with a more nutritious, unprocessed, whole form of sugar.
When you have accomplished this significant step forward, CONGRATULATIONS! You are now ready to proceed…
Step 2: Increase the Amount of Whole, Unprocessed Fats in Your Diet
The sugar cravings many of us experience are due to the lack of enough healthy, whole fats in our diet. Dietary fat stabilizes blood sugar .. sweet cravings become overwhelming on dips in blood sugar.
I used to think that it was a lack of willpower that was preventing me from succeeding in getting my sugar cravings under control. As it turned out, it wasn’t a lack of willpower at all. It was my low-fat diet that was the primary problem.
Once I switched from skim milk to whole milk (preferably unprocessed directly from the farm), the whole yogurt from low-fat or fat-free yogurt, and butter from vegetable oil and butter substitutes, I noticed my sugar cravings rapidly diminished!
As part of this step, be sure to clear out of your pantry any item that features a “reduced-fat” or “fat-free” marketing line on the package.
Fat is your friend when you SLAY the sugar monster!
So go ahead and load up on butter – the best quality your budget can afford. Eat that delicious fat that surrounds your grass-fed steak. It tastes great for a reason! It is full of nutrition and it is a huge asset in stabilizing your blood sugar.
Don’t worry that your triglycerides will shoot to the moon and that you will drop dead of a heart attack. It is the factory fats that are so dangerous to your cardiovascular health, not whole unprocessed fats in milk, cream, eggs, and butter. Doctors and nutritionists who tell you otherwise are not up on their research.
Definitely avoid transfats, partially hydrogenated fats, interesterified fats, and any other rancid, cheap vegetable oils that are used in processed foods. But welcome with open arms cream, butter, egg yolks, coconut oil, and other forms of traditional, nourishing fats.
As you increase the whole fats in your diet, most people find the introduction of a therapeutic strength probiotic and homemade fermented foods to be of great benefit.
Probiotics will help to rebalance gut bacteria to a favorable ratio and keep candida under control. There are dozens of recipes on this blog that show you how to make all kinds of fermented foods and fermented drinks that will keep those pathogenic yeasts in your gut under control that are a big contributor to out of control sugar cravings. Homemade kombucha is an excellent choice for this purpose (NOT store brands that are high in sugar!).
Step 3: Remove All Forms of Processed, Whole Sugars From Your Home
Once you have abandoned the low-fat lifestyle and embraced traditional fats in your home, you are ready for the next step. Get rid of all processed sugar foods in your home even if made with organic, whole natural sweeteners.
That’s right, lose the natural sodas, organic cookies, pop tarts, organic chocolate, and any other organic junk food that you started buying when you switched from refined sugar to natural sugars in step one above.
This may seem difficult but wait…let me explain.
You can still eat as much natural, whole sugars as you want. Examples include maple syrup, sucanat, coconut sugar, and date syrup.
Inconvenience Factor
The catch is that now you can’t buy them…you have to make them yourself.
So if you want chocolate chip cookies, have at it. You must make them yourself using a cookie recipe using whole sweeteners. You can’t just walk to the pantry and pick up a bag of Newman’s Organic Chocolate Chip Cookies.
What this step introduces is the inconvenience factor.
When something is inconvenient, most of the time, you will just skip doing it, am I right?
For example, if I have a bag of organic chocolate chip cookies in the pantry and a very stressful event occurs suddenly out of the blue, the chances that I am going to walk to the pantry and eat some, or more likely, the entire box of cookies is rather high.
At least it is for me.
If, on the other hand, I don’t have any prepackaged, easy to munch organic cookies in my pantry at all, the chances that I will whip out the mixing bowl and make some chocolate chip cookies myself are much much lower.
In this step, you are still allowed to drive to the store and buy some organic cookies if your craving is overwhelming. But, when you walk through your front door, whatever you haven’t eaten in the car gets thrown in the trash (or given away). That’s right – they hit the circular file.
Only homemade sweets made with natural sugars are allowed in your home from this step forward. You can make as many homemade sweets as you like and consume as many as you like. But, they must be made by hand.
This step is where the rubber meets the road. Can you do it? You absolutely can if you are eating lots of whole fats in your diet! Eating lots of whole, unprocessed fats is your ace in the hole because your cravings will never be overwhelming as your blood sugar will be stable the majority of the time.
Step 4: No More than 3 TBL (36 grams) of Natural Sugars per Day
Congratulations are in order if you have made it this far to the fourth and final step. You are now 90% of the way to slaying the sugar monster in your life!
The final step involves a gradual reduction in the amount of natural sugars you consume to a safe level of no more than 36 grams per day. According to Tom Valentine in his classic anthology Search for Health, significant immune system suppression begins to occur above 36 grams of sugar from all sources on any given day.
This is the amount for adults, by the way. It would be about half (18 grams) for children. This is the amount you must try to refrain from exceeding in any given day. Note that the natural sugar in fresh or dried fruit counts toward this daily total.
How long should this step take? As long as is necessary. For some, it will take one week. Others may find it takes several months. The point is to keep moving forward and don’t give up if you fall off the wagon on occasion. Just get up, dust yourself off, and keep going!
Ideally speaking, some of your days should not include any sweets at all after a while. Having a goal of no sweets ever is not realistic, however. I suggest not going there mentally. It sets you up for failure.
Our culture is sugar-saturated so sometimes you are simply going to indulge. Don’t worry about it or feel guilty about it for even one moment when it happens.
If you have slain the sugar monster in your home by transitioning to only natural sugars, eating more whole fats, forbidding organic junk food from finding a regular home in your pantry, and eating homemade sweets only on an occasional basis, then you have absolutely accomplished your goal!
You are now eating natural, whole sweets in moderation and enjoying them in a safe manner that will not threaten your long term health.
Well done, my friend!
Where To Find Wholesome, Natural Sweeteners
These are the wholesome sweeteners I use in my home. Once you transition to unprocessed sugars, you won’t ever go back to white sugar or high fructose corn syrup laden products ever again!
Where can I find some recipes for making these desserts that don’t use sugar and use the substitutes?? Thanks
Sarah, I just found your website and I am having trouble manuvering through it and can not seem to friend you on FB either. I know I need to make some changes but don’t know where to begin. SCD, WAPS, or” getting the fats right”. Please help!!!!! Teresa
Slay the Sugar Monster in Four Doable Steps – The Healthy Home Economist http://t.co/WqDa4GJs
Sarah: I read your suggestions on how to slay the sugar addiction. Seems a bit draconian to me. I too am trying to reduce my sugar intake. i am using a natural approach to dealing with a certain health condition. And it was suggested that I stay away from drinking alcoholic beverages, caffeinated drinks hot or cold, nicotene, and sugar. I have also been eating more fruits and drinking natural fruit juices containing natural fructose. And I have stopped eating candy. However, i have begun eating organic chocolate bars. Small ones. And once in a while I have an ice cream cone at lunch time. What else can I do?
Maybe you could try cold turkey – of all sugars – for two weeks to try a reset. Two weeks really isn’t that long and you will find that by the end you will know what you want to bring back into your diet. I started by cutting bread and processed foods, then I stopped adding sugar to my coffee so I would learn to love it without the sweetness and I stopped all soda. Maybe asses how much sugar you are drinking and see if you can find improvements there. Even if it says ORGANIC doesn’t mean it is what we need in our body. But everyone is different and there is no right or wrong. Find what works for you!!
My information is accurate. It was the result of clinical experimentation, not opinion. Please read the article I cited.
This issue is confusing because the body can’t convert fat to sugar. Therefore, the fat you eat doesn’t add to your blood sugar. Also, fat delays gastric emptying and therefore can decrease the rate at which the carbohydrates in any given meal end up in your bloodstream. However, this doesn’t mean that you have a healthy metabolism. Eating a fatty diet causes insulin resistance. If your insulin resistance is bad enough, then you can end up with abnormal blood glucose levels if you eat any carbs at all. Eating a starchy, low-fat diet restores insulin sensitivity and can actually cure type 2 diabetes in a remarkably short time.
The hype about “healthy fats” is just hype. Trans fats, which are often a product of hydrogenation, are somewhat rare in nature and are much more thermodynamically stable than their cis counterparts. Trans fats are almost certainly worse for you than their cis counterparts, but any kind of fat can contribute to insulin resistance and atherosclerosis. Sugar is fairly benign, unless you are eating amounts that could really only come from eating processed foods. Remember, we share nearly all of our DNA with fruit eaters. It simply doesn’t make sense that we would thrive on fat but sicken on a low-fat, high-carb diet.
Couldn’t help commenting on this post.
1. I have to wonder who funded this study. There are many “studies”, actually virtually all, that are funded by corporations, think Big-Ag, whose main interest is to sell whatever product they are trying to sell and the results will reflect that. (Same as what the pharmaceutical companies do). Considering that the American diet experienced an unprecedented overhaul around the beginning of the last century, with refined sugar, processed grains and artificial hydrogenated oils essentially replacing traditional, high-fat (read animal fat), whole grain diets, with very little sugar consumption, I’m thinking this study was created/used to push the new cash-crops on the American public. This is also, if I recall correctly, about the time, heart disease appeared on the US stage…virtually non-existent when everyone was eating eggs fried in bacon-fat or butter every day.
2. Though it may seem logical that we should be eating the same types of foods as our primate cousins, our digestive systems are different. The digestive system of human beings has evolved over millions of years with most of that time spent on consuming animal-products and complex carbs scrounged up in the wild; and later the type of traditional diet outlined by the Weston A. Price Foundation, on which Sarah reports in her blog; this includes many fats, very limited grains (only, soaked & sprouted), fermented foods, incl. veggies, and some fruit; as a general outline. You have to remember that grains (in general & esp. as we know them) are a relatively new component of the human diet and in centuries past, were not consumed in nearly the amounts they are now. We still have a saying in Slovakia (from whence I hail), that “you have to work hard for your bread”. People would have maybe one slice with dinner, or two max a day-whole grain and home-made (my grandmother used to make her own), the rest being broth-based foods/soups, saurcraut, meat if you could afford it, raw milk & cheeses, very limited veggies etc. a hundred years ago. The diet has changed dramatically since as great-grand children have begun to binge on white-flour, sugar (me having been one of these), and most recently processed foods and “fake-oils” that they could never have afforded back in the day. When every family had pigs, geese and chickens in the yard, we didn’t have an epidemic of diabetes and cancer like we do now :o(. I know that even in my grandparents’ day, fruit, such as an apple, pear of plums, was a special treat, not an everyday snack. We are a culture of mushroom and berry pickers, still popular Summer-Fall pastimes, so wild berries (the best in the world) were probably eaten more, but in limited amounts. Growing season was short, so much had to be preserved or dried, to keep for the long Winter-months…fermentation preceded refrigeration. It was the fat that allowed the people, as poor as most were, to survive, often much longer than their wealthy flour-endowed counterparts.
You should definitely take a look at the Weston A. Price foundation website. These folks are not trying to sell any product. The research is real, based on field studies, among cultures whose diets haven’t strayed from those of our own ancestors, and who have remained healthy as a result.
Also, a fantastic resource, with full scientific explanation, of how the human body processes what, and why this differs from certain other animals, is: “Deep Nutrition: Why Your Body Needs Traditional Food” by Dr, Catherine Shannahan (who had to slay her own “sugar monster” to get healthy ;o) and Luke Shannahan. She has her own blog too.
Why do people like you even come to this website? Your a joke just like your link. Nothing but a tool for Big agriculture and there lies. My husband and I lived in Germany and the border of France for five yrs and I can tell you they laugh at americans and their low fat bull. They are all healthy and skinny and they have family owned farm to table resturants that serve nothing but unprossed food. These people do not need data to tell them what is healthy they have thousands of years of good eating habits to know what is healthy. That is where we learned are good eating habits from, ie raw milk free range hens and so on. I was on a low fat tofu diet for years and felt like crap. Thanks to some German friends I found out about good fats and was about to loose 25 lbs the first 6 momths and I had no sugar cravings at all! They eat bread too but from the years of bad eating I put my body through I can not eat bread and still am loosing weight but slowly. In sort I gained weight and craved sugar on a lowfat diet and was told to eat less and less. So people like you who want to slap that “well I have a link that is scientific proof” go somewhere else. Dr. Price and his book is all the scientific proof I need. Thanks but no thanks!