The key to quitting sugar is understanding the 5 things in your way: Your brain, environment, habits, gut and (maybe) friends.
Diet and health has always been a big topic, especially with an increase in the number of overweight and obese people with diabetes. While there is a bit of a fight between low carb and high carb, the thing that deserves the most attention is quitting sugar, as cutting out refined sugars and processed foods is the most sure-fire way to improving health and regulating weight.
The mindset and approach of really understanding how and why bad habits like this develop can be applied to all sorts of things (stop smoking etc.)
How to Quit Sugar & Unhealthy Habits
What I’ve Learned
Key Takeaways
The key point of this video is to explain why people become inclined to eat sugary foods, and how to undo this inclination. The other thing is the mindset to have when approaching this as well as how to react when you have a craving.
There are 5 things that are working against you that need to be addressed. Once those are out of the way, quitting sugar becomes really easy.
1. Brain sugar keeps you consuming it regardless of the amount of food you have eaten for 2 reasons.
The first is it is biologically addicting. Sugar acts on your reward center in your brain to give you a sense of pleasure when you eat it. When you frequently consume sugar, you become tolerant to it and require more to get the same amount of pleasure. Then you can suffer withdrawal symptoms like headaches, tremors, mood swings and irritability when you go without eating it.
Another way sugar keeps you eating more food in general is by keeping you hungry. Eating sugar causes an access release of insulin, and when there is too much insulin present in your body, your hypothalamus cannot pick up on its leptin signal. Leptin is a hormone released from the fat cells that is registered by your brain as a “satiety” signal. So when your brain can’t pick up on that signal, it thinks you’re starving.
Your brain also interpets hunger as your environment not having much food available. It says ‘we need to use less energy by reducing activity and we have to store whatever energy comes in.”
Anything that raises your energy expenditure makes you feel good- things like coffee, exercise or ephedra. Anything like hunger, that lowers your energy expenditure makes you feel crappy. The sugar keeps you hungry and feeling lethargic and crappy. Quitting cold turkey quickly breaks this cycle after a week or two. The longer you go without sugar, the better you will feel.
“Reducing sugar doesn’t mean reducing happiness.” You need to get it in your head that you’re not depriving yourself of anything by quitting. Extended use of sugar changes your brain so that you crave it. A lot of people, when faced with the idea of quitting sugar, will equate it to depriving themselves of pleasure. Sugar isn’t raising overall happiness, it is simply creating a temporary contrast in happiness.
If you’re constantly consuming sugar, you can be making yourself unhappy, lethargic, and fat without realizing it. What happens is your baseline happiness is lowered, and you have a spiked in pleasure when you eat sugar. However, when you’re not depended on sugar for that boost in pleasure, then your baseline happiness is much higher and you’re more content all the time, not just when you get sugar.
The other thing people will do when approached with the idea of quitting is that they will start to predict the agony they can expect. The reality is your body adapts to the absence of sugar, so you will feel much more comfortable without it. You can expect to feel much better in as little as a week to two weeks.
2. Environment advertising & almost any store selling food. Food companies have found that with virtually every product they sell, they can add a little bit of sugar to a product to make it tastier and more profitable. This is why sugar is in 80% of foods on the market and it’s mostly in foods you wouldn’t expect to have sweetness in them. You have to put in some effort to ensure that what you’re buying doesn’t have added sugar and you have to ignore all the tempting advertisements and colorful packages.
Your brain has a lot of ways to prepare you for what it expects to happen, and this is the same with food. When we think about, see or smell foods, our brains trigger what is called the Cephalic Phase Insulin Release to prepare you for digesting that food. The sweeter the brain thinks the food will be, the more insulin it stimulates in the pancreas to release. This extra insulin can make you feel even hungrier as it will block your leptin signal.
Just the sight of sweet food can make you hungrier even though the contents of your stomach have not changed at all.
You can deconstruct this programmed response the brain has created. If your normal programming is: see picture of food, buy food, take food out of the package, eat food then advertisements or food labels in the store can have a strong effect on you.
However, if you change your programming to: see real food, check if food is fresh or ripe, cook food, and then eat food, your brain will stop associating colorful packages with eating and it will become much easier to resist well-marketed foods.
3. Habits In “The Power of Habit,” Charles Duhigg talks about the Basal Ganglia, a primitive part of the brain that takes long series of actions and packages them into a single “chunk”
Duhigg says that habits “…emerge because the brain is constantly looking for ways to save effort.” Think of a commute to work, or backing out of a driveway. What do you remember about it? Not much. This is because your Basal Ganglia takes over and you run on “autopilot”
The thing is you can auto-pilot your meals too. As you repeat an action, a fatty tissue called myelin covers the axons of your neurons. Myelin speeds up and strengthens nerve impulses, allowing actions associated with certain neurons to be performed with much less mental energy. This is where ‘practice makes perfect” comes from, but this also explains why people get stuck into certain routines.
You can get “good” at anything you do. You can get good at deciding that you’re better off going for the packaged foods since you’re too tired to cook. You can also get good at resisting cravings for junk food, buying some proper food and taking it home and cooking it.
Understanding the cause of the craving makes it much easier to control. Be mindful of how you’re feeling while craving something and think about why you’re doing this. Reacting to an advertisement? Headache from withdrawal? Stressed?
By analyzing and understanding what it is that’s creating the craving makes it really easy to get it under control and let it pass.
4. Gut sugar contributes to the breakdown of the intestinal barrier, resulting in a “leaky gut” which increases your body’s exposure to inflammation and creates several problems like worsening insulin resistance.
Recent evidence is showing that an unhealthy Gut Microbiome could be to blame for ADHD and autism in children as well as Alzheimer’s and general brain fog in people of all ages.
One way in which sugar affects your Gut Microbiome specifically is by facilitating the growth of the problematic candida. Candida is a type of fungi, a single-celled member of the yeast family. An overgrowth of Candida can lead to problems like fatigue, weight gain, bloating and gas, irritable bowel syndrome, and constipation. Like other types of yeast, the preferred food for Candida is sugar.
Like other types of yeast, the preferred food for Candida is sugar. As the numbers of Candida increase, it is suspected that they can directly cause sugar cravings as this is their preferred source of energy. This doesn’t sound so far-fetched when you consider the fact that we have a network of 100 million neurons lining our guts. This network is so extensive that it’s nicknamed the “second brain” This second brain is thought to have a significant impact on your mood and overall health.
One thing you can do to speed up restoration of a healthy gut, as well as quitting sugar, is to eat fermented foods and take prebiotics and probiotics.
5. Family & Friends your friends and family who frequently consume sugar will most likely prefer that you continue to eat what they eat. They might excuse you of becoming a health nut or tease you and claim that sugar isn’t that big of a deal.
This can get tricky when friends or family bring up certain points about sugar to justify why it’s ok. Most common being sugar can’t be that bad because it’s in fruit. This is when one of the most effective actions comes in: simply read as much as you can about the topic of sugar. This not only allows you to respond to any questions and concerns you’re presented with but will further strengthen your resolve towards quitting.
All the data point to restricting processed foods and refined sugars being conducive to good health and proper weight management.