Thursday, March 10, 2011

My dysfunctional relationship with Sugar

I am not quite 30 years old, and although I don't have many every-day reminders that I am aging, the one thing that I feel changing is that my body no longer tolerates my sugar addiction. So instead of feeling junk, and then feeling junk again and again and again and again (key word: addiction), I finally said "enough!" and went off sweets. To make my goal reasonable, I went off sweets for two weeks, had a weekend off to enjoy a few treats, and then went back on my two week hiatus. If I could handle moderation I would really love to hit that middle ground, but I know my habits too well to think that moderation is very realistic for me at this point.


The most fascinating thing about this experiment was my weekend of sugar consumption between my two-week no-sweets stints. The first evening of eating sweets again was a beautiful reunion with frozen yogurt and cookes, but it was not worth the price I paid the following morning. My body had totally acclimated to not having to process an overload of sucrose, so when I surprised it with excessive dessert, the next morning I spent trying to survive the most excruciating stomach pains ever. If you were inspired by the first paragraph to try to give your body a break from sweets, by all means, please do so without being scared by this second paragraph! I just give a fair warning that your body is smart and can make adjustments quickly, so go slowly if you are changing back to digestion-unfriendly foods.

1 comment:

M said...

My moderate solution is No High Fructose Corn Syrup (and no artificial colors or flavors)...if you do that you weed out all bought candy, cakes, and cookies.

If I have to make it, I control what goes in it, how big it is and how much I eat of it. Going off all bought candy was hard...we only eat good chocolate now (I buy the dove promises) and 2 is perfectly fine. I feel tons better and we don't get sick (stomach or otherwise) half so often as we did before.

Good luck! Be well!