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How I overcame my addiction to sugar

josem.co

111–120 of 210 posts

Re: How I overcame my addiction to sugar

#111
post #3

It's nefarious! Especially if you have a dopamin deficiency (ADHD, etc.) and you eat so you aren't bored. I can eat 500g of m&ms in one sitting, no problem, and I'm not even overweight or something.

Switch to nuts, but be sure to pair with citrus, to offset the oxalates, or you'll get kidney stones. Food cravings often reflect mineral cravings (1) 1. https://dailyhealthpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/21-fo...

>Switch to nuts

Nut are crazily high in calories though. Walnuts are 650 calories per 100 grams (and 100 grams are not that difficult to eat!).

100 grams of steak are like 270 calories for comparison (less than half!).

Re: How I overcame my addiction to sugar

#112
post #32

Replacement works for me. Replaced all added sugars stuff (drinks, ice cream, cookies) with fruit and the difference was very noticeable. Fruit also has its own kind of sugar, but my body runs differently on that compared with food with added sugar.

I use a GCM and one thing I've noticed about fruits in general is that the glucose spike is short. Things level off on the graph fairly quickly with berries. Although there are some fruits that do cause a significant spike. Fruits like grapes, pineapple and bananas are the worst ones.

Re: How I overcame my addiction to sugar

#113
post #88

You can eat whatever you want if you just work out seriously an hour a day. If you do that properly, gaining weight will become the challenge.

I also find it challenging to put on weight when exercising, but to make this comment more accurate you may want to caveat that this is how your body responds to exercise. Many people appear to experience a commensurate increase in appetite after exercise such that they do not lose weight unless they also consciously restrict calories.

With low intensity endurance training (cycling in zone 2) I find my appetite adjusts accordingly, and remains high for a period even if I'm not doing the exercise, and that's when I gain the weight.

Resistance training (bouldering for me) seems to have little effect one way or the other.

If I'm doing High intensity interval training (usually stair sprints) on a regular basis, it's hard to eat enough, my metabolism gets absolutely jacked.

Re: How I overcame my addiction to sugar

#114

A decade ago I got into intermitted fasting and forced myself to drink my coffee black at work. Going from a double-double (x2 cream, x2 sugar) at timmies to black. big change but the IF motivation for mental clarity, and increasing my metabolism worked out so well that I didn't mess with the regiment until recently adding oat milk to my coffee, or butter. its really about dealing down the dark coffee flavour. beyond…

One little tip for people trying to move to black coffee from milk and/or sugar:

Try to find a good light roast, not dark or medium. Light roasts are usually less bitter which is why milk is sometimes added to cut the bitterness.

Coffee preferences are very subjective, this is what worked for me, YMMMV.

Re: How I overcame my addiction to sugar

#115
post #98

When I'm working on the computer late, eating chocolate or other sweet things was a real crutch. Not doing it required a lot of willpower, so I could sometimes limit my consumption for some periods, but I gave up on quitting sugar in the long run. For other health-related reasons (migraines) I went keto since a few months ago and had no problems at all quitting sugar altogether. Nuts, cured ham are great for occasion…

>eating chocolate or other sweet things was a real crutch. Not doing it required a lot of willpower

Not buying them and not having them around the house though, requires much less, and helps when it's late at the computer and you crave some!

Re: How I overcame my addiction to sugar

#116
post #109

> When I returned from my trip, my fridge was empty, so I resisted the temptation to buy those products. This has to be my reality. If I buy treats, no matter how good my intentions are to make them last, they just don't survive in the cupboard more than a couple of days. I have to leave my kitchen mostly empty apart from: diet soda, meat, cheese, yoghurt, peanut butter. Everything else is just too addictive and I ke…

Much alike a recovering alcoholic, it's easier just not to go into a bar. I do exactly the same thing by not having a phone. I know I would be that guy always looking at it instead of engaging with the real world. So I just don't have one. It's better that way.

Sometimes I consider dumping the phone in a drawer.

While I haven't quit cold turkey, I've found life much much more peaceful since I uninstalled most of the apps on my phone. Email, chat, maps, and music. I think I left notes and a password manager.

Now it isn't trying to get my attention all the time. Even disabling notifications would have helped.

A couple of my friends and I host our own Matrix homeservers, so even that is pretty quiet.

Re: How I overcame my addiction to sugar

#117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there seems to be some benefit in having a "regular" meal every now even then, perhaps even once a week - I read once that your body can adapt too well to using Ketones and you stop losing weight at the speed you did at the start (although my caveat to that is that the first time I did keto, I lost pretty consistently a bit over 0.5kg per week for about 9 months apart from a couple of 2-3 weeks plateaus). E…

I’m not you, so I can believe it doesn’t work for you, but I don’t have trouble with ditching carbs, probably because I’m almost never a sugar monster. Just not my thing. Lucky for me, sucks for you. Appetite is complex and while I’m not one of those people who can eat junk ravenously and be thin, I don’t have that to deal with. Best wishes.

Oh, sorry, I wasn't trying to give you advice as it sounded like your result was pretty stable - was just replying for others reading to let them know that sometimes a carb break in the middle of keto actually helps, and it was meant to agree with your sentiment that you don't need to worry about the odd thing here and there.

The rest was just my experience of after I'd got to my goal weight on keto, of trying to stop keto and do something midway between keto and not keto. For me, that never works - some carbs each day, leads to more carbs, leads to lots of carbs. That was never an issue while on keto - I'd just go back to my highly restrictive diet, just that I never found re-introducing carbs easy to moderate. FWIW it's worth, I'm starting keto for the 4th time now. The first 2 times were effective, until I stopped. The third time I tried to be less restrictive than the previous two times, and I didn't really achieve any weight loss.

The "you" in that paragraph about sugar monsters was actually me, but I used the "you" form because I though it could probably generalise to whoever was reading, not specifically you in particular. Sorry for the confusion.

Re: How I overcame my addiction to sugar

#118
post #105

Very long article, for something so simple. Stop eating i.e. fast. The cravings go away within 48h. Done, solved.

This is like:

- You're depressed? Just cheer up!

- Gee, why haven't I thought of that!

Fasting wont take away the cravings, if anything it will make them worse (after a few days you feel very hungry and all you can think about is food, then there's a period where you don't mind, then you are starving again, and so on).

And even if it did, once you stop the fast you get the cravings again.

Re: How I overcame my addiction to sugar

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several others have mentioned that after cutting back on sugar, many foods taste overly sweet, but they're probably still eating way more than you do when you're on Keto. When I stopped Keto, entire categories of food become intolerably sweet. It was at least a year or two before I could eat a burger. They're basically a meat cake!

McDonalds is actually OK for Keto. The restaurant is built on the principle of trying to trick you to have carbs so you still feel hungry and buy more, but actually the meat on its own isn't terrible. A couple of double cheeseburgers without buns in a stack makes a good meal. If you're really after the burger feeling, get two mayo chicken burgers without mayo or buns and use the lightly battered chicken burger as you…

McD double cheeseburger is one of the best protein/$ available in fast food. (depends on market)

Re: How I overcame my addiction to sugar

#120
post #74
post #32

Replacement works for me. Replaced all added sugars stuff (drinks, ice cream, cookies) with fruit and the difference was very noticeable. Fruit also has its own kind of sugar, but my body runs differently on that compared with food with added sugar.

As soon as I stopped eating sugar, I started craving fruits intensely. My body began demanding compensation.

And eating fruits it's almost equally bad sugar wise, especially drinking them in smoothies and such.
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