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I went into a popular department store today to pick up a couple of items and not for the first time was shaking my head over the fact that even non-food stores seems determined to make us eat.  No doubt marketing research is behind this product placement, but it boggles the mind to figure out why there needs to be Godiva chocolate bars at the brassiere register. Or, the shoes, or just about any of the many check out in these stores.

Not so many years ago you had to at least go to a chocolate department, aisle, or store to get such sweets, but getting through any store without the assault of sugar everywhere you turn is becoming a challenge.

What about parents trying to get the week’s shopping done when the worst hazard is the checkout aisle, where both sides are lined with candy, soda, and gum, even baked goods nowadays.

So here comes the tired harassed, probably highly stressed customer trying to just get the underwear or shoes or salad greens for dinner, and s/he must run the gauntlet to get out of the store without succumbing to the dozens of sugary/starchy options just in arms reach.

As I experienced for many years, you may do well for days and weeks avoiding the foods that are most addictive, but given the right amount of stresses, a low day or hour, and most people will fall victim to the barrage.

What we who finally recognize our status as sugaraholics must keep in mind is that the addictive quality is what puts these foods in those places to begin with. Researchers know how easily we will give in, and those dollars add up quickly.

What we sugaraholics also have to recognize is that we cannot so much as entertain the idea of having any amount of the sugars-artificial sweeteners-starches without become once again caught up in days of bingeing.

Imagine how this scenario would be for an alcoholic. What if they had to face bottles of gin, whiskey, and wine at every checkout? They would soon become prisoners in their homes if they found it too challenging.

More and more I order as much as I can online to avoid having to traverse the stores and their irritating product placement. Even drug stores will ask at the checkout: Would you like to try our 2-for-1 candy bars?  No! I’m trying to be healthy; wouldn’t one at least expect a drug store to help in that process?  But apparently making profits out strips any other consideration.

The best defense is a good offense, as they say in sports. So look at this array of sweets for what it is, a way to manipulate people into buying something they do not need, or even want. I’ve decided I will not participate in such blatant money grubbing. There is always a better option waiting for me at home, or in a place where I am in control of the outcome.

Always on the defense against sugar,                                                                        Sugarbaby

“I can’t ever have chocolate ice cream or brownies again!”

“You mean, no bread, ever?”

“What, no pasta! I can’t give up pasta.”

“But what about Thanksgiving or holy days?”

“My kids wouldn’t go along.”

“You can have treats, but just not too much. It’s calories in, calories out.”

These are a few of the things I have heard people say about going on a lower carb, no sugar eating plan. I have personally thought several of them myself.  People fear change, period. People fear personal change, that is, changes in how they behave, even more.  No doubt there is a biological basis for this fear, but we can look at our way of thinking and evaluate it for its merits or misconceptions or fears or anything else that might get in the way of our health and happiness.

What strikes me as interesting is that I’ve heard no one say the following when engaging me about my low carb diet:

“What, I wouldn’t be craving all the time?”

“You mean I can lose all this fat and get healthy?”

“I could cure my pre-diabetes/diabetes condition?”

“I could be lean and fit again?”

“My kids won’t struggle with mental and physical conditions brought on by excessive sugars?”

“You mean I will still enjoy holiday meals without all the starch and sugar?”

The great psychologist Albert Ellis who put rational thinking on the boards pointed out in his many books that the rational, logical way of thinking is often the last recourse for most people. We know many things on the rational level, yet emotions will trump them time and again. Think of anything you truly regret having done, and chances are very high that you knew, logically, that you should not do it, but you did anyway for other emotional or self-indulgent reasons.

Sometimes people don’t want to change at such a deep level they delude themselves that what they are doing is right, or acceptable, or that eventually it will lead them to some mythical promised land. These are people so attached or devoted to their behaviors that any change is unthinkable.

Never underestimate the mind’s capacity for rationalization.  Here are some classics:

This one won’t hurt.

I’ll start tomorrow.

A little will be okay.

I deserve it.

It will make me/him/her happy.

When it comes to addressing the truth of our relationship to food, especially sugars, artificial sweeteners, starchy carbs, we are in one state or another, and a sensible person—that is a person with the ability to see reality as it is—will recognize that state. Generally we are either being self-indulgent, self-deluded, or self-controlled.

Once you recognize that being self-indulgent or self-deluded is what is causing you to continue in self-destructive behaviors with food, the sooner you can get on the way to being a person who is self-controlled. To be in control of oneself is a great asset to all kinds of achievement in life. To be out of control is to be at the whim of any passing cookie or donut, and hardly a person who can say s/he is happy with their condition in life.

Yours in the pursuit of self-control,                                                                                      Sugarbaby

When you are young there are many good things going for you not the least of which is this wonderful thing called Growth Hormone (GH). The advantage of growth hormone is hard to overstate. Because a human child has a lot of growing and developing to do from fetus to fully fledged adult the body encourages this effort via several processes, but growth hormone can be thought of as a work horse in the body making sure the all the hormonal processes are working well, helping to build muscles, bones, organs, keeping the liver from holding on to too much glucose, and much more. The long and short of it is that people with lots of GH have a sturdy metabolism, a faster metabolism, which is why a young man of 18 years can eat from dawn to dusk, lots of less than ideal food, and still stay lean. I remember most of the boys in my family, my brothers and cousins, who would drink a half-gallon of milk a day, eat enormous meals, and complain constantly of being hungry. None of them were over weight.  Girls lose this advantage sooner than boys, and often notice a tendency to put on a few pounds as they get into their twenties, while the guys often have no real weight concerns until their thirties.  But that is changing in these days of gross amounts of overly refined sugars and starches. For the first time in history  we are seeing many overweight children, teens, and young adults.

Males continue to enjoy the muscle mass advantage until late middle age, but again, that is beginning to change as our nation becomes ever more obese. Indeed, as you have no doubt read and heard, we have an obesity epidemic.

Why it matters, is that any struggle with weight will be directly related to how much you ingest of sugar, artificial sweeteners, refined carbs. There may be a one-in-a-million person who is genetically overweight, but even in such a case, the last thing they would want to eat is the Threatening Three: sugar, artificial sweeteners, refined carbs.

There were no children in my classes in elementary school who would have qualified as fat. We had a few kids we called “stocky” or “husky”; kids who nine times out of ten grew out of their baby fat by high school or college. Look at a school class now and the numbers of obese children is significant, and this is very scary.

Obesity means not only the misery of being fat, not being able to run, play, have social relationships of the quality you might want, but it means serious health issues in the making. The best known is diabetes, a disease that causes a list of horrors, and slow descent to ever worse health and eventually death. But most of what is being called diseases of the west, or modernity, is a product of a diet we did not evolve to eat, and are ill equipped to handle. Sugars/carbs cause obesity which causes heart disease, this is well known; sugar is implicated in autoimmune diseases like arthritis and lupus; and is increasingly being linked to cancer.  Cancer cells live on glucose/sugars, so even if the cancer was not caused directly by sugar, it literally feeds the cancer.

For me it mattered that I felt owned and controlled by the cravings beast I have only half-jokingly called the Kraken, since the Threatening Three released this monster in my mind and kept me constantly thinking about food and eating, even when I had just had a huge meal. I hated how I felt so out of control.

You undoubtedly have your own list of reasons you would like to be free of the weight and the cravings, whatever they are, we can all be in possession of the one thing that can save us years of declining health, and daily misery, and that is abstinence. Get sugar sober and be free.

More to come,                                                                                                                            Sugarbaby

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

For several years I had been substituting artificially sweetened beverages and food for the things I really wanted. I recall first drinking a diet soda pop sweetened with saccharine in the late 60s and thinking: Yuk! Saccharine was the only artificial sweetener in common use back then; gaining popularity in World War II when in Europe and to a lesser degree in the U.S., sugar was heavily rationed.  Saccharine which is 300 times sweeter than sugar was accidentally discovered in 1879 by two scientists at Johns Hopkins University. Saccharine was in the few existing diet sweetened products of the time, but has  a bitter after taste, at least for most palates, so did not rise to the level of popularity that Equal and Splenda have enjoyed.  In the 1950s, concern arose that saccharine might cause cancer, which led to introduction of the long popular SweetnLow, a cyclamate sweetener, and this was put into the first diet soda in 1953, NoCal.   But, like saccharine, there is an after taste many find unpleasant. Cyclamates and saccharine, often used in conjunction, were used in many products like toothpaste and lipstick.  Then the new miracle sweetener aspartame (it is 200 times sweeter than sugar) came along, and was approved by the FDA in the early 1970s. Here was a sweetener that tastes sweet,  just like sugar, without the awful after shock. Equal, as it was first marketed, was like a dream come true for people like me looking to cut back on sugar.  We should have known that if a thing seems too good to be true,  it very likely is.*

Another sweetener, acesulfame potassium ( about 200 times sweeter than sugar), marketed as Sweet One, was discovered by scientists looking for a cancer drug; it has been used with other sweeteners in a variety of products, and was re-popularized by Suzanne Somers in her diet books and products.

Aspartame enjoyed the better part of three decades without much competition, until sucralose (which is 600 times sweeter that sugar), marketed as Splenda, came along. Splenda, unlike aspartame can be used in cooking without affecting the taste.

Notice how these artificial sweeteners have gotten ever more potent? We have to wonder what that does to the brain.

What many people are beginning to discover with the help of people like Gary Taubes, a science writer, is that the brain is reacting to these sweet tastes in a couple very bad ways. First, this excessive sweetness dulls our palates for the ordinary sweet tastes. Second, the artificial sweetener, the ersatz sugar, is giving the brain the message that real food is coming. So when no nutrient comes along, the brain begins to pester us further to bring on the food. We in effect are set up to crave even more, and as studies are showing, eat more in the long run. We create a self-perpetuating cycle of feeling hunger, turning to faux foods artificially sweetened, that do not satisfy the brain/body, and so we crave even more. What a merry-go-round of misery.

Further, to add to all the rest of the problems,  aspartame is thought to cause many problems, including problems in the brain’s functions. (More on this later.)

The only real answer to stopping the incessant cravings for sweets is to eat good foods, low in carbohydrate, abstaining from all sugars and sweeteners.

Yours in learning,                                                                                                                            Sugarbaby

*(http://leda.law.harvard.edu/leda/data/244/Nill,_Ashley_-_The_History_of_Aspartame.pdf)

Ever find yourself standing in front of the fridge, door opened, eyes scanning? Are you looking for that tasty and healthy lettuce, carrots, or the left-over pot roast or pickled mushrooms? If you are a Sugaraholic you stand there looking for something that will satisfy the sugar-carb cravings. All the purely good food is not what your brain is scanning the big box for, or honing in on if some nice pudding or fruit-salad happens to be there.

Ever find yourself wandering time and time again to the kitchen, scanning the cabinets and pantry, exploring the cupboards, checking those hiding spots just in case a stray package of cookies or candy is still hiding there? Fat chance! The kitchen trek could potentially turn up many delightfully good things to eat if hunger were really the problem, but it isn’t

In fact, for Sugaraholics, real hunger is likely unknown, or, if ever known, long forgotten. My experience was the longer I was a Sugaraholic the poorer my hunger sensor became. I could go all day and never feel hungry if I was busy, but once I did begin to eat it was not a pretty picture, especially if I was away from home. At least at home I might have cooked a decent meal, but if I were still late at work, or driving home and realized I hadn’t eaten all day, then it was a likely I might binge. I’d stop at the first convenience store or drugstore (increasingly a misnomer) for milk, a package of cookies, chips, or several things which would get eaten on the way home. If I didn’t need to get home a make a meal for my spouse, I was likely to hit one of the fast food chains for one of my predictable fixes.

You know all this, don’t you? You have been there those hundreds of times. You and I have eaten a very healthy meal, then had to have a treat—may have driven to get that “little” treat. We are fix-oriented when we keep eating food in a way that we know is unhealthy and is making us fat and miserable.

We know there are some people who can eat a couple cookies and go on their way, and for years we may convince ourselves we will do that, too, after this one last binge. We live in the world of tomorrow. Tomorrow I will start my diet; tomorrow I will not eat anything sweet except fruit; tomorrow I will exercise more. We have given up years of our lives in expectation of tomorrow magic.

Like the alcoholic who must accept that s/he can no longer drink any alcohol, we sugaraholics must give up all the sweets, carbohydrates, artificial sweeteners that keep us repeating these dead-end behaviors. (More on this tomorrow.)

I no longer stand in front of the open fridge for I know there is nothing there but good, wholesome food. If I’m hungry I get something to eat, but it is to feed the body, not the sugar-sweet addiction. However, now when I stand there I remember all those lost years of looking for the sweet, and glad to have it behind me. But only if I stay away from the sweets-carbs-artificial sweeteners.

Yours in health and happiness,
Sugarbaby

Most people think of just a handful of foods when they hear the word sugar, but to the brain-body anything that is a carbohydrate food becomes sugar when broken down in the body. Sugars from all sources including fruits and vegetables, starches from all sources, even excess meat protein can be converted to sugars. Artificial sweeteners are no solution, since they trigger cravings and raise insulin, too. What sugars we get should be from vegetables, especially leafy greens, and fruit; however, if weight is an issue, stick to leafy greens and lower sugar berries.

Finding the sugars hidden in processed foods takes some work reading labels. Reading labels for sugar is made more difficult since sugar has many aliases. Here are the main ones; if you know of others, let me know.
SUGAR BY ITS MANY NAMES
Agave nectar
Barley Sugar
Brown sugar
Cane crystals
Cane sugar                                                                                                                                             Corn Solids
Corn sweetener
Corn syrup
Crystalline fructose
Dextrose
Evaporated cane juice
Fructose
Fruit juice concentrates
Glucose
High-fructose corn syrup
Honey
Invert sugar
Lactose
Maltose
Malt syrup
Molasses
Raw sugar
Sucrose
Sugar
Syrup
Barley malt
Beet sugar
Brown sugar
Buttered syrup
Cane juice crystals
Cane sugar
Caramel
Corn syrup
Corn syrup solids
Confectioner’s sugar
Carob syrup
Castor sugar
Date sugar
Demerara sugar
Dextran
Dextrose
Diastatic malt
Diatase
Ethyl maltol
Fructose
Fruit juice
Fruit juice concentrate
Galactose
Glucose
Glucose solids
Golden sugar
Golden syrup
Grape sugar
High-fructose corn syrup
Honey
Icing sugar
Invert sugar
Lactose
Maltodextrin
Maltose
Malt syrup
Maple syrup
Maple sugar
Molasses
Muscovado sugar
Panocha
Raw sugar
Refiner’s syrup
Rice syrup
Sorbitol
Sorghum syrup
Sucrose
Sugar
Treacle
Turbinado sugar
Yacon syrup
Yellow sugar