Posts Tagged ‘sugar addiction’
Precious Sleep
I have been coming up short of sleep lately and I can feel everything suffering as a result. For one, it makes commuting for 2-hours a day a hazard of droopy eyed distracted driving. I’m too exhausted to think clearly, I’m getting grumpy, and my sugar cravings are defeating my best intentions of thwarting them.
It becomes a vicious circle of fatigue breeding fatigue. On Tuesday night I had hoped to get to bed promptly in the evening to allow time for a full 8-hours of slumber. Circumstances foiled that plan and I stayed up about 2-hours later than I planned. In and of itself, that would have been manageable, but then my keen mind and body betrayed me an hour before my alarm would have gone off Wednesday morning, leaving me wide awake, when that was the last thing I could afford to experience.
Precious sleep got lopped off on both ends of the cycle.
It hasn’t helped at all that our internet connection has been totally unstable of late, causing me to languish in the limbo of half-loaded pages and images in my quest to toss up another entry in the daily blog effort.
I have a plan to get back at the dang fickle connection. I’m writing a short post and getting it done fast, so I have more time to sleep. Wish me luck…
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Periodic Assessment
Yesterday was the day of our annual furnace inspection by the company that installed it a few years ago. So far, so good. Honestly, I would have been shocked if he had found something amiss. We are past the initial break-in period where manufacturing or installation issues could appear, and it is still new enough that no parts should be wearing out. Plus, it has been performing flawlessly from the start.
Still, I pay good money for the peace of mind to know all is well.
Our experience last fall of discovering the cracked tiles in the flue of our chimney bolstered my confidence in the value of regular check-ups.
Upon recommendation from someone at work, I watched “That Sugar Film” last night. I invite you to check out the trailer for a sampling. It might make you crave seeing the whole movie. It served as a periodic assessment of my sugar reduction/control efforts, not that I wasn’t aware of some slippage in the wrong direction.
I struggle with a physical addiction to sweetness. Well, mental and physical, frankly. Every time I cheat a little on my attempt to stay below the recommended healthy daily amount of calories from sugar, I feed the mental monster. My mind then works with my body to coerce me into feeding the urge.
It is weird to watch the movie and get a sense of how similar my sugar craving is to drug addictions that are publicly looked upon as all around bad things, while the food industry flashes spectacular and colorfully happy ad campaigns in broad daylight for products laden with the chemical that will capture our minds and make our bodies sick.
Think, tobacco industry. How many years did they get away with it? Cigarettes were safe. Heck, they were even good for you! NOT!
That scene is happening today with soft drink companies, cereal, yogurt, pasta sauces, …pretty much all processed foods. They are all safe! Enjoy!
We can trust them, because they pay scientists to collect data that shows everything is okay. It’s fine. Don’t worry. Have some more. You know, a calorie is a calorie, whether from sugar or otherwise. NOT!
Don’t fall for the ruse that you should be able to exercise enough to justify that next sugar laden meal. That is a war that can’t be won.
If you have children, save them from this. Please, understand the effects of sugar on our brains and bodies.
Addiction is addiction. Pick a poison. Street drugs, prescription drugs, tobacco, gambling, sex, shopping, food, sugar.
When choosing to profit off the human brain’s cravings, a company should have a plan to hide the facts about making their customers sick. Maybe no one is noticing the obesity trend and subsequent increase in associated diseases, like diabetes and heart disease. Go ahead, keep on eating the convenient foods filling the grocery store shelves.
What this movie points out is that he doesn’t eat the obvious soda pop, candy, and ice cream which most people know should be moderated.
He chooses supposed “healthy” choices of cereal, yogurt, juices, and snack bars during his 60-day experiment. It’s eye-opening, even for me.
I need to renew my effort to spot what my brain is doing to feed its craving.
Last night, it was pasta for dinner. It was soooooo good.
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Try Imagining
Try imagining that you are daily striving to tightly control the percentage of sugar in your total caloric intake, despite the onslaught of incoming treats at work from a number of generous, well-meaning sources, and yesterday, when you arrived home from work and opened the door to your house, you were met by an overwhelming aroma of fresh-baked goodies that practically lifted you off your feet.
For some reason, as soon as I am home from work, I want to eat something. It is one of the trickier parts of my day, in terms of managing my choices in avoidance of unnecessary sugars. I’m happy to eat anything, as long as it doesn’t take any time to prepare. Crunchy, salty, and sweet tend to be cravings that most strongly nag me.
Yesterday, at my weakest moment, Cyndie was moving fresh-baked cookies off a tray, onto the cooling rack. I don’t think there is any better time to test a cookie than when it is still warm from the oven. I hadn’t even finished setting down things I had carried in the door when I sank my teeth into the irresistible goodness of a cookie that tasted like a cinnamon bun.
Cyndie mentioned that she hadn’t put the icing on yet, which helped to calm some of my angst. Knowing that I was eating less sugar than the cookies would ultimately have helped me justify my choice. See how that works?
Really, try to imagine walking in the door to this:
I wish I could provide a smell-o-vision feature, to give you the full effect.
Next Sunday afternoon we are hosting a “neighborhood cookie social” for folks living around us, most of whom we’ve yet to meet in the three years we’ve been here. Cyndie printed out an invitation and then drove a loop of the immediate roads surrounding us to the west, where we know a handful of folks, including our good friend and trusty farrier, George Walker.
Multiple locations have mailboxes grouped, and she wasn’t sure about which mailbox went with which house, so she just put an invite in every box. Roughly 30, she said. We have no idea how many may show up, and we likely won’t recognize but a few.
Imagine that. It should be fun!
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Craving Again
It has been about two months since I watched the movie, “Fed Up,” and decided to do something about the amount of sugar I was ingesting every day. I decided to work on reducing the sugar I was consuming by focusing on nutrition labels and paying attention to serving size and the amount of sugar in each serving. By simply doing that for a little over a week, I noticed a physical reaction and experienced some surprisingly intense withdrawal symptoms.
I think the dramatic physical response helped to bolster my motivation to stay vigilant about seeing this through to a point of achieving a lasting break in the pattern of consuming an unhealthy amount of sugar.
It isn’t easy.
Just when I was beginning to feel as though I was satisfied with the new routine I have established, I discovered a significant resurgence of cravings.
It’s not the first time I’ve been through this. Several times in the past, I have made attempts at not eating sweets. One thing that always happened was a robust urge to eat breads. Even though I recognized that I was exchanging sugar for more complex carbohydrates, I didn’t tend to restrict that urge. I figured the struggle to avoid sugar was hard enough. I didn’t want to take on two things at once.
Well, it wasn’t two things, really. It’s all part of the same issue I’m facing. My blood tests repeatedly revealed my glucose levels to be pre-diabetic. This time, I am working on a more thorough, and a more informed, change in diet. After only a few weeks, I began to notice a reduction in body fat.
I suppose it didn’t hurt that I went on a bicycling trip for a week, and then sweated through the process of putting up over 250 bales of hay.
I also noticed an increasing level of satisfaction from my reduced portion sizes. By regularly making healthy, low-sugar choices, I was discovering a new appreciation for not-so-sweet alternatives. It was refreshing and felt very rewarding. It gave me hope for the possibility of my satisfaction being met by a healthy, balanced menu.
But it wasn’t a cut and dried sure thing. There is a bit of a gray area. There are high and low tides. My diet isn’t rock solid, by any means, and the sweetness I am getting swings above and below the optimum. More than once I have caught myself feeling precariously hypoglycemic.
Then there are the days when the cravings rise up. They can be insidious and particularly tenacious. If I ignore them, they don’t generally go away. I need to work the program. I allow myself some modest treats. There is a slippery slope there, though, and I am cognizant of past experiences where I have succumbed and chose to give up altogether.
I feel like the difference for me this time is that I am better informed. Between my new understanding and the experience I’ve gained in the past, I believe I have the tools and inspiration to endure my cravings and thrive on a healthy diet for much longer than ever before. I hope it’s for the rest of my life.
I need to keep thinking big picture. What I ultimately crave, after all, is optimal health!
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Two Articles
If you wait long enough, things tend to come around again. I’m not just talking about music and fashion, either. An unending onslaught of studies, some more scientific than others, seem to appear with regularity in headlines for bringing ever-changing perspectives to the forefront.
I spotted a bit of celebrity talk on my news feed yesterday, but what caught my attention about it was the reference to ‘sugar-free’ and the film, “Fed Up.” In this case, it supported exactly what I am currently experiencing and it felt very affirming. Filmmaker Kevin Smith has dropped significant weight after experiencing the same insights I did upon watching the documentary about how sugar is contributing to today’s health woes.
The old targets of scorn in the American diet were at one time fat and cholesterol, and maybe that will come back into the limelight again before the end of time, but my present battle is with sugar. It used to be that I shouldn’t eat eggs. I am so happy to have eggs safely back on my menu these days.
Years ago, sugar was considered a bit of an extravagance, but then it became something added to almost every processed food, and our national palate adjusted to the point of expecting sweetness in everything.
I plan to ride the reduced sugar band wagon for as long as I can hold out, figuring the next wave of food information will come along well after I have made peace with my addiction.
The second article that showed up for me yesterday hit on a subject near and dear to me for decades of athletic endeavors. I am a big proponent of optimal hydration, but like everything, there is a critical balance that should be maintained. Yes, I’ve heard the scary threats that you can die from drinking too much water. That has never been a concern for me. However, I have long adhered to the advice that waiting until you notice feeling thirsty puts you behind the curve of maintaining optimal hydration.
I also tend to use the clarity of my urine output as a gauge of desired hydration. Both beliefs are now being challenged by an article on Critical Journal of Sport Medicine.
“In all cases, blanket statements that can be found on the internet such as “don’t wait until you feel thirsty” make little sense for the majority of casual athletes” – Preventing Deaths Due to Exercise-Associated Hyponatremia: The 2015 Consensus Guidelines, Mitchell H. Rosner, MD
At this point, what I intend to take from my limited understanding of the clinical verbiage and specific qualifiers for the science the article intends to express, is that I will try not to be overly confident going forward, about my level of understanding of optimal hydration. I plan to continue to rely on my intuition and the results I experience with regard to what is right for me.
Your mileage may vary.
But back to the sugar thing, I invite you to spend a day tracking how much you REALLY consume in a 24-hour period, then see if it seems right to you. I may not comprehend all the clinical details, but my intuition tells me there is definitely something problematic with the current American high-sugar diet.
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The Twentysixth
On this day, many, many years ago, I was born. I wonder if I subconsciously knew what I was getting into at the time. In so many ways, I am still the little boy who was trying to figure out which way to go.
I haven’t ever noticed any maturation of my inner consciousness. In my mind, I have always been the same age, or ageless. I have a recollection of one day realizing that I was able to reach the Dixie Cup dispenser in the kitchen of my childhood, on my own, but that was strictly physical growth. It was a memorable milestone for me.
It meant I could drink milk whenever I wanted, because we also had a milk-can refrigerated cooler/dispenser with a heavy knob lever that pinched a rubber hose to control the flow of milk. Lifting that lever brought very cold milk that flowed so quickly it would create a froth on top.
Eventually I would be holding bowls of cereal under that hose and getting ice-cold milk on my Cocoa Crispies, or Sugar Puffs, or Cap’n Crunch. My sugar habit started way back then, back before the introduction of corn syrup. In the 1970s, things began to change in the food industry and my addiction was off to the races.
I consider myself lucky to have let my sweet tooth run free for so many years and not suffered outrageous weight gain. I have no idea whether it would be accurate to blame my prolonged high-sugar diet for my depression, asthma, arthritis, and belly fat, but more than one source I have read seems to implicate it as a potential cause for those afflictions, and more.
It makes sense to me that we are dealing with something we don’t completely understand, given the relative short span of our entire human history in which we’ve been consuming such dramatic amounts of sugar annually. Sugar was a rare luxury for most of the world until the 1800s when granulated sugar was invented.
I don’t believe our bodies have evolved enough in the last few generations to effectively deal with the onslaught of glucose that is altering the balance of enzymes and minerals which regulate bodily functions and deliver nutrition to our cells.
In many ways we are healthier than ever before, yet at the same time, we may be undermining the best of our health by the over-sweetening of the majority of packaged and prepared meals and snacks which we consume today.
I’m now closer to 60 than I am to 50 years old. This year I am working to undo the years of accumulated sugar consumption in hopes of reversing a trend toward diabetes and possibly clearing up a few other nagging ailments. It’s a little like being born all over again. It’s not the first time I have made a conscious decision to change course and start down a new path toward better health.
As always, I seek optimal health. It’s one of the best birthday gifts that I can give myself. Happy June 26th!
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Sugar Withdrawal
Despite how I felt yesterday morning, when my body seemed to be reacting as if I were withdrawing from an addiction or something, today I feel somewhat renewed. I’m doing really well.
In a classic sense of relativity, breaking a sugar addiction is both really hard and rather simple. It comes down to how you choose to frame it. Seriously, yesterday I had a spell where I felt like things were out of control and my legs were ridiculously weak as I trudged up to the house from turning compost, because I was exhausted and felt like I should get some water. I have a history of tremors, but what I next experienced was more like the shakes of withdrawal.
It startled me. I had decided not to try a cold turkey detox from sugar. I simply reduced my intake to something closer to the recommended daily amount. I am primarily reducing portion sizes to serving suggestions, which is a dramatic way to discover how much excess I have been consuming on a regular basis.
My body’s reaction was as if I was completely withholding the key to its survival. I have noticed a couple of periods of ravenous cravings. They don’t come to me as a need for something sweet. It is trickier than that. I simply get a compelling urge to eat something. It’s as if my body knows that it doesn’t need to force me to eat candy or other treats to get sugar, which I would recognize right away as not the healthiest choice. Maybe I would just grab a convenient (processed) granola bar or make a couple slices of toast.
Results: Sugar!
My body would get what it was after. It is a complicated relationship between my brain and the cells of my body. Logically, I understand that I shouldn’t consume too much sugar, but physiologically, the brain responds to the ever-increasing input and becomes programmed in the insidious relationship with the cells to keep up the supply and demand.
So, what? Now I have to outsmart my own brain? It doesn’t seem right. Who is in charge here, anyway?
I guess that I (unwittingly) taught myself how to be addicted, so now I have to teach the brain and cells how to get back to where we once belonged. You know the tune.
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My Addiction
Hello, my name is John, and I’m an addict. Studies with laboratory rats have found that the substance of my addiction happens to be more rewarding and attractive than addictive drugs like cocaine.
I am addicted to sugar. I have known this for a long time, but only now have I come to understand to what degree, and how futile my previous attempts to self-regulate have been. I have my children to thank for recommending I watch the movie, “Fed Up,” which has informed me more clearly and concisely than other sources that have come my way up to this point.
For the past 6 years or so, I have been receiving news from two different doctors who have performed my annual physical examinations that my blood tests show me as being ‘pre-diabetic.’ I wasn’t completely surprised, because I knew I had a sweet tooth. I try to eat a generally healthy diet, and I usually get plenty of exercise, so I figured it wouldn’t take much to produce better results the next year by eating less sweet treats.
I love ice cream so much that I figured that was something I should be careful to control. I can often times avoid candy, though I do have trouble with occasional binges. When I give in to the urge, I usually give way in and go for broke. Other times, I just subtly slip myself one or two treats, one, two, or ten times a day, so I don’t notice how many I have truly consumed.
I never really counted calories, let alone paid attention to the actual number of grams of sugar I was ingesting. The annually increasing paunch that is expanding my middle, seen clearly in this shot Cyndie captured of me with the Morales boys in Guatemala a couple of months ago, was easily dismissed as a function of my age and lackadaisical attitude about what I was eating.
I now understand that I have been consuming a dramatic amount of (hidden) sugar every day in foods beyond simply just the desserts to which I have succumbed. The food industry has taken every advantage to push their products on the under-informed world by making processed foods sweeter and thus irresistible to the inevitable cravings for more which result.
The sugar industry is in business to make money, not to keep us healthy, and the public policy of my government is supporting the obesity epidemic in this country with subsidies. On average, I bet I have been eating between 3 and 4 times the recommended healthy amount of sugar daily, and I have been doing so despite the fact that I don’t drink soda pop (one of the most evil of sources for sugar calories) or put ketchup on my food.
One of the worst things I do is exceed serving sizes as indicated on food labels. My vice after ice cream is cold cereal and milk. It is no surprise that there is a lot of sugar added to processed cereals. Whatever the label shows, I usually consume twice that or more, because I rarely stop at one bowl.
Our nutrition facts food labels indicate how much sugar there is inside, but the food industry has successfully steered the government away from forcing the added reference of what percentage of the recommended daily allowance would be. It’s there for fat, carbohydrates, sodium… but not sugar.
If I should be limiting myself to less than 25 grams/day, I can easily exceed that at breakfast alone, with multiple bowls of cereal, orange juice, and toast. I usually have two slices. Ever look at how much sugar there is in bread? Double that, because a serving size for the nutrition label is commonly 1 slice.
The movie, “Fed Up“, has given me new incentive to address my addiction to sugar. I don’t know how anyone in America who isn’t thinking about this issue can possibly avoid exceeding the healthy amount of sugar per day, given how much processed and packaged food has become a part of our eating habits.
I urge you to see this movie, with hope that it will help spread the word about how pervasive sugar has become in processed foods and the consequences of not paying attention to it.
Here is the trailer to hopefully inspire you to seek it out:
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Relative Something 