I was enjoying a one cup serving of apple crisp (one small apple, sliced and topped with chopped walnuts mixed with butter and cinnamon, then baked) I made today (fruit besides berries is for me only a once a week indulgence) and was relishing how that this tasted as sweet to me as a normally sweetened version would have once. As I went for my short walk, I was pondering that if anyone had ever emphasized what I’ve since learned, back in the days when we heard avoid sugar, eat more fruit, messages, I would probably have been in line sooner to give up the addictive substance.
What they don’t tell you, what they have never emphasized in any of the many sources I’ve read the last thirty years, it that very quickly you won’t miss the sweet. No one tells you that your taste buds will quickly readjust to what Mother Nature intended, and you will be just as satisfied with the non-sugar foods, as you ever were with the sugar laden foods. Indeed more satisfied. What they don’t tell is that it is relatively painless to give up sugar, that you will enjoy food all the more for you won’t be subject to the painful rounds of binges that for many people have defined a long and frustrating period in their lives.
What they don’t tell you is that sugar is highly addictive for a goodly portion of the population, and that the over-emphasis on the sugary and/or starchy foods that are most intensively advertised everywhere, all the time, lead to cravings; and that those cravings have nothing to do with your will power, and everything to do with the primitive part of our brains that controls most of the vital—as in necessary for life—parts of our brains.
What they don’t tell you is that you are not being deprived if you happen to be one of the people who are more highly affected by sugars/starch and need to abstain from them. Even the Powerball is required to put a disclaimer on their signs that give the gambler a Gambling Anonymous number. Cigarettes come with dire, and accurate, warnings of the dangers of smoking. Alcohol must put a reminder on the label telling you to drink responsibly. But there are no such reminders or warnings on all the boxes of cookies, candy, cakes, pies, soft drinks, etc, which will in fact lead far more people to have shorter lives, with costly diseases that are clearly related to the western diet, and that you could spend years in sheer misery in the house of constant cravings.
Get sugar free, sweetener free, and lower carbohydrate, and you will be able to tell those who marvel at your dramatic weight loss and improving health what no one bothered to tell us.
Until next time,
Sugarbaby
Sugaraholics 